Sci-Fi Adventure Blockbuster Strands A-List Star In Outer Space
At this point, audiences have spent countless collective hours watching Matt Damon get rescued from foreign locales, including numerous war zones, flight crashes, and interstellar treks through space. A now-famous 2015 write-up in Time Magazine even calculated the cumulative cost of saving Damon at over $900 billion in total. While Damon’s cameos are a welcome surprise in most of these rescue films, his leading performance in 2015’s The Martian serves as a career-best, grounding the entire sci-fi premise in a way that makes the daring survival film and subsequent rescue entirely believable.
The Accident
The Martian is currently streaming on Max for those who haven’t yet had the pleasure of catching the spacefaring classic, or for those just desperately in need of a rewatch. In the film, Matt Damon stars as Mark Watney, a botanist and astronaut tasked with exploring the Acidalia Planitia plain on Mars in the not-so-distant future of 2035.
When his crew suddenly find themselves at the center of a severe Martian dust storm, Watney is impaled by debris and thought dead by his peers, who proceed to evacuate from the foreign planet with haste.
The Story
Once the (literal) dust has settled and the crew are deep into their journey back to Earth, it is revealed that Watney survived his wound, and took refuge in one of the camp’s man-made structures.
With no direct comms to Earth headquarters and no sign of humanity for millions of miles, Watney resolves that his only way to survive is to cultivate plant life on the barren surface and await an impending unmanned mission scheduled for 4 years in the future.
As The Martian builds to its thrilling climax, viewers follow along with Mark Watney’s video diaries which catalogue his successes and failures in surviving on Mars, while the NASA crew back home come to learn of Watney’s survival and mount a nearly-impossible rescue operation.
The Cast
While most of The Martian is bolstered by Matt Damon’s excellent performance, the film also touts an excellent cast of A-listers, including Jessica Chastain, Kristen Wiig, Kate Mara, Jeff Daniels, and Game of Thrones‘ Sean Bean.
The film also touts a surprising number of Marvel alumnus within the cast, including Sebastian Stan, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Benedict Wong, and Donald Glover. The Martian was written by Netflix’s Daredevil creator Drew Goddard based on a book by American author Andy Wier, and directed by legendary filmmaker Ridley Scott.
The Reception
Critics and audiences alike were quick to hail The Martian for its inventive premise, powerful performances, and visually stunning special effects. Today, the film touts a staggering 91 percent certified fresh critic score on Rotten Tomatoes.
Personally, I love this movie, and place it second only to Interstellar on my list of favorite sci-fi adventure classics. Incidentally, Interstellar also contains a sequence which sees Matt Damon rescued from an uninhabitable foreign planet, though things pan out much differently for him there.
Stream It Now
GFR SCORE
Though The Martian is one of those films that I’d highly recommend catching in a theater, you can do the next best thing by streaming the space odyssey today on Max. Just a word of advice- if you plan on eating something while watching the film, you’d be well advised to skip any potato-based dishes. You can thank me later.
