Ridley Scott’s “The Martian” strands an astronaut on a dead planet and then refuses to let him die of sadness. That is the whole trick, and it works. Matt Damon plays Mark Watney, left behind on Mars in 2035 after his crew mistakes him for dead during a dust storm. The film runs 141 minutes. It is a science fiction survival story, a drama, and an adventure, and it earns all three labels without tipping into the maudlin.
Trailer, via 20th Century Studios.
A Dust Storm and a Potato
The setup is clean. The Ares III crew is exploring Acidalia Planitia on sol 18 of a 31-sol expedition when a severe dust storm threatens their Mars Ascent Vehicle. During the evacuation, flying debris strikes Watney. The crew presumes him dead and lifts off for the Hermes, which will carry them home. Watney wakes up alone.
His only real chance is the next mission, Ares IV, four years away. The Ares IV MAV has already landed at Schiaparelli crater. So the clock is not a countdown to rescue. It is a countdown to starvation, and the film knows the difference.
Watney is a botanist, which the film treats as a superpower rather than a credential. He grows potatoes inside the Hab using the crew’s bio-waste and Martian soil. He makes water from leftover rocket fuel. He modifies a rover for the trip to Schiaparelli. None of this is presented as magic. It is presented as work.
Damon’s performance is the load-bearing wall. He talks to a video diary because there is no one else to talk to, and the film never lets that device feel like a cheat. He is funny in a way that reads as survival rather than comedy. The tagline is “Bring him home,” and Damon makes you want the tagline to be true without ever begging for it.
NASA Notices a Garden
On Earth, the film splits into a second machine. Mindy Park, a NASA satellite planner played by Mackenzie Davis, spots Watney’s activity in recorded satellite images and suspects he is alive. Teddy Sanders, the NASA director, is played by Jeff Daniels. He releases the news to the public but decides not to tell the Ares III crew, who are already on their way home. Mitch Henderson, the flight director, played by Sean Bean, objects strongly.
That decision is the film’s best argument. It is not a villain move. It is a bureaucrat weighing five lives against one, and the film lets you sit with how reasonable it sounds.
Watney eventually hikes out to retrieve the Pathfinder probe, hoping to restore communications. Vincent Kapoor, the Mars missions director played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, figures out the strategy and goes to Bruce Ng, the JPL director played by Benedict Wong, to use their replica of the probe. The age of the hardware becomes the problem. The film turns a museum piece into a lifeline.
The Ensemble Is Deep and Mostly Wasted
The cast list is long enough to be a liability. Jessica Chastain plays Melissa Lewis, the mission commander. Kristen Wiig plays Annie Montrose. Michael Peña plays Rick Martinez. Kate Mara plays Beth Johanssen. Sebastian Stan plays Chris Beck. Aksel Hennie plays Alex Vogel. Every one of them is competent. Several of them are barely in the movie.
Chastain prepared by meeting astronauts and scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center. She modeled Lewis on astronaut Tracy Caldwell Dyson. “She’s very matter of fact, very straightforward,” Chastain said. “My character is dealing with the guilt of leaving a crew member behind, but she’s still responsible for the lives of five other crew mates. I tried to play her as Tracy would have been in those moments.”
That is the right instinct, and it shows in the performance. Lewis is not hysterical. She is a commander doing arithmetic with her conscience, and Chastain plays the arithmetic.
Damon took a different route. “For me, the rehearsal process was sitting with Ridley and going kind of line-by-line and moment-by-moment through the script and playing out a plan of attack for what we wanted each scene to accomplish.” You can feel that method in the film. The scenes have a plan. They accomplish it.
The Casting Fight Worth Remembering
The Media Action Network for Asian-Americans criticized the casting of Davis as Mindy Park, whom it said author Andy Weir had described as Korean-American. The group also criticized the casting of Ejiofor as Vincent Kapoor, whom it said Weir described as an Asian Indian character. In the novel the character was named Venkat Kapoor and identifies religiously as a Hindu. In the film he is a Baptist and a Hindu. The group called these decisions whitewashing, part of a broader pattern that deprives Asian actors of opportunities.
Weir responded in October 2015. He said he perceived Mindy Park as Korean but did not explicitly write her as Korean. He dismissed the criticism of Ejiofor. Kapoor is “an American,” Weir said. “Americans come from lots of different sources. You can be Venkat Kapoor and black.” He said his novel intentionally avoided physical descriptions of his characters.
Naomi Scott was cast and filmed as Ryoko, a member of the JPL team. Her scenes were cut from the final film. That detail sits badly next to the rest of the argument. A production that defends itself against a whitewashing charge also left an Asian actress on the cutting room floor. The film does not get to have it both ways.
Budapest, Wadi Rum, and a $108 Million Budget
The production history explains why the film looks the way it does. Producer Simon Kinberg began developing it after Fox optioned Weir’s 2011 novel in March 2013. Drew Goddard adapted the novel and was initially attached to direct. Production was only approved after Scott replaced Goddard and Damon was cast as Watney.
Filming began in November 2014 and lasted about 70 days on a $108 million budget. Twenty sets were built on one of the largest sound stages in the world in Budapest, Hungary. Wadi Rum in Jordan supplied the exteriors. The result is a Mars that feels like a place rather than a backdrop, and the practical scale is a large part of why the isolation lands.
The film premiered at the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival on September 11, 2015. It opened in the United Kingdom on September 30 and in the United States on October 2, in 2D, 3D, RealD 3D, IMAX 3D, and 4DX formats. It grossed $630.6 million worldwide, the tenth-highest-grossing film of 2015 and Scott’s highest-grossing film to date. The National Board of Review and the American Film Institute named it among their honorees that year.
What Actually Holds Up
The Martian succeeds because it refuses the obvious version of this story. The obvious version is a man raging at an empty sky. Scott and Goddard made a film about problem-solving instead, and the problems are specific:
- Grow food in the Hab, using the crew’s bio-waste and Martian soil.
- Manufacture water from leftover rocket fuel.
- Modify a rover for the long overland run to Schiaparelli crater.
- Retrieve the Pathfinder probe to restore communications with Earth.
- Reach the Ares IV MAV, already waiting at Schiaparelli, before the four-year window closes.
That list is the movie. The tension is not whether Watney will feel despair. It is whether the next fix will hold. The fixes are also the film’s structure:
- A dust storm that forces the evacuation
- A potato garden inside the Hab
- A Pathfinder probe pulled from the Martian surface
- A JPL replica used to rebuild contact
- A rescue window four years out
The weaknesses are real, and they are mostly structural. The ensemble is too large for its own good, and the Earth-side thread sometimes plays like a procedural with better lighting. The film also softens the novel’s harder edges, which is a choice, not a crime.
But the central pairing is the reason to watch. Damon and Scott built a survival film where competence is the emotional engine. The scene that matters most is not a crisis. It is a man doing math.
Here is the part worth arguing about. The Martian is often sold as a crowd-pleaser, and it is one, but its real subject is institutional failure and institutional repair. NASA loses Watney through a storm, then spends the rest of the film trying to undo it. The Pathfinder sequence, the JPL replica, the Ares IV MAV already sitting at Schiaparelli — all of it is infrastructure, not heroism. The film’s most radical claim is that a man survives because a lot of other people did their jobs well years earlier and kept doing them.
That is also where the casting controversy bites hardest. A film this invested in who gets to be part of the machine should have been more careful about who it put in the room. The cut scenes of Naomi Scott are not a footnote. They are the same argument, unresolved.
The Martian is not Scott’s most ambitious film. It is his most efficient one. It takes a premise that could have been a dirge and turns it into a procedural about a botanist with a garden and a grudge against the odds. The result is warm, smart, and a little too pleased with its own competence. It earns the pleasure.
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