Imagine Ridley Scott’s predicament when, two months before the release of his sci-fi adventure The Martian, NASA informed him on the down-low that it had discovered water on Mars. In The Martian, Matt Damon plays a U.S. astronaut mistakenly left behind on the red planet; forced to improvise, he manufactures his own water by burning the rocket fuel hydrazine to release hydrogen, which then combines with the oxygen in his little laboratory to create condensation. But now NASA has announced evidence of briny water flowing beneath the surface of Mars and wetting the ground, facts that would have been well known to our futuristic hero. These things happen in the sci-fi game, but it’s an unlucky break for a filmmaker like Scott—since the days of Alien (1979) and Blade Runner (1982), he’s put across some truly fantastical conceits by coating his stories with a sheen of hard science.
Interviewed by the Times, Damon wasn’t having any of that. “We don’t need an Oscar-bait kind of scene of some guy wailing and pulling his hair out,” he remembered telling Scott. “I don’t want to see that, and I don’t want to do that.” During long space journeys, small irritations can become magnified to the point of madness, yet The Martian plays this idea for laughs, with a running gag in which Watney rants about the dearth of any music at the outpost other than the commander’s collection of vintage disco (the soundtrack includes “Hot Stuff,” “Rock the Boat,” and, naturally, “I Will Survive”). In fact, being stranded on an alien planet doesn’t seem all that bad: Watney is like a kid on summer vacation, playing around with his science projects, watching reruns of Happy Days on a flat-screen monitor, and recording a goofy video log for the folks back at NASA.
Directed by Ridley Scott
