The first trailer for Ridley Scott’s The Martian was released this week, giving us our first glimpse of Andy Weir’s novel of a stranded astronaut on Mars on the big screen.
The Martian stars Matt Damon as Astronaut Mark Watney, who is assumed dead after a major storm catches the crew of a Martian mission on the surface of the planet. After the rest of the mission departs the planet, Mark finds himself stranded and “sciencing the shit out of” circumstances to keep himself alive.
Eventually the fact that Mark is alive becomes known on Earth. As NASA works to contrive a plan for his survival, his former crew mates, led by Jessica Chastain, plan a rescue-mission that will bring them back to Mars to pick up their lost comrade. The whole affair fascinates the world, as the watch to learn the fate of The Martian.
The movie looks like a suspenseful and thrilling affair (a rare statement for a Ridley Scott picture), one that’s looks to take a hard science-fiction approach to life in space. Watney, for example, must discover ways to extend his habitat from a mission-length abode into permanent housing. He must learn to grow food on a planet with no life, and communicate with Earth to inform them of his survival.
To live, Damon will have to channel Bill Nye and MacGyver, in space-duct tape, science and on-camera charm.
This all depends, of course, on the very un-scientific decision to rescue a single person stranded on Mars. But we need to start our stories somewhere, and if anyone can convince the world to mount a four-year rescue mission, and even, as Jessica Chastain says in the trailer, commit mutiny, just to hitch a ride, it’s Matt Damon.
The Martian re-assembles the very adept Ridley Scott crew. Production designer Arthur Max and cinematographer Dariusz Wolski both Scott regulars, return, giving the trailer that Ridley Scott slickness. Max and Wolski provide beautiful worlds that have physicality and depth and make fictional world, on our planet or another textured. Most of that hard work is ruined, though, in Scott’s overwrought storytelling.
This is the director who took the story of Moses and Egypt and turned it into something that earned almost no emotion of consequence. So much drama, and very little weight.
If there is reason to believe The Martian might break the Scott same-ness of emotion and bombast, it could be in the film’s writer, Drew Goddard. Goddard co-wrote and directed the excellent, surprising Cabin in the Woods, after cutting his teeth on Buffy, Alias, and Lost. He’s currently the show-runner on Marvel’s Netflix show Daredevil, an uneven, if at times inspired bit of serial drama.
Whether Goddard can inject enough of life into Weir material o withstand the Ridley Scott production machine remains to be seen. But if he does, The Martian might get Scott to the podium for the first time in his career.
