The Martian

Ridley scot’s track record hasn’t been great recently, both Prometheus and Exodus Gods and Kings were not exactly barn burners and the less said about the councillor the better. It’s nice to see then a return to form with the Martian a film which knows how to mix serious with silly. Our titular hero Mark Watney (Matt Damon) is stranded on the inhospitable landscape of Mars and must MacGyver his way to survival. One of the main strength of the Martian is the humour that is infused throughout the script, humour that is lacking in some of the director’s previous efforts. Now a lot of the credit of this has to go to Damon who spends a great deal of time alone of camera talking to himself and logging his endeavour of surviving. This could easily have become a gloomy affair with Watney brooding about his fate, instead we get a fleshed out character that is driven by the all too understandable need to survive. One thing about the Martian that has really caught the public imagination is the films attention to realism, now of course man has never been to Mars and so this is all theoretical, it is however a world away from the technobabble we find in other sci-fi. Our main character’s dilemmas of food and water and far more understandable than the usual science fiction tropes of alien virus’s or invasion’s. One small break from the realism is, when NASA has trouble with its rescue mission the Chinese space agency steps in to help without being asked…..or in fact asking their own government for permission. I’m not saying this could not happen it just seems a bit unlikely This is the Ridley Scott I want to see again, I really honestly hope that this is a return to form for Scott and that he keep his newly discovered form and keep his cinematic output in the FINAL VERDICT 10/10 a high score perhaps but one that takes into account the distressing dross that has come from Scott recently