The Martian: Thrills are from Mars

Cast: Matt Damon, Jessica Chastain, Kristen Wiig, Jeff Daniels
Rated: 7.5/10
Hope flutters eternal in human breast and under director Ridley Scott, it blooms unexpectedly. He lends trust to hope, campaigns for it, fights gargantuan impossibilities and manages to convince his viewers to root for his hero deserted and almost sure to die on a lonely planet millions of miles from Earth.
It is refreshing to see that this spatial saga is not some deep, dark highly gizmotic science fiction heavy on machines and jargon even though a lot has been taken from NASA for authenticity.
That Scott uses wry humour as the main vehicle of hope in his cryptic sounding hero Matt Damon only adds to the allure of this film. Scott was a late entrant to the show but leaves his indelible mark on the proceedings, much enhanced by their inherent positivity.
Fighting a storm and being hit flat out by his antenna, Damon is inadvertently left behind on Mars for dead by a fast exiting crew intent on beating the catastrophe while on an Aeries III exploration mission.
A survivor and not one to be felled by either injury, hopelessness or the stark truth that the next mission would visit Mars only four years later, Damon does everything he can to stay alive in a non-oxygen, non-water environment where not a soul has ever existed for billions of years. And that includes recording his daily doings on his laptop, creating water vapour, beating the isolation and making his humorous entries in his survival log.
Scott does well to maintain the pace despite the utter loneliness and inertia of a deserted landscape which is in focus almost 90 per cent of the time. It’s the wry humour of Damon which keeps proceedings alive. All this is ably countered by the mayhem on Earth where the entire NASA establishment (after dutifully performing the last rites of Damon by the way) goes into a tizzy to design a rescue mission once the director gets to know that Matt is, indeed, alive.
Meanwhile, amid funny one-liners, and growing Martian potatoes using his own shit as manure, Damon keeps alive and kicking despite all the vagaries of a non-life planet and the stark truth that there is more than enough chance of him dying there, undetected.
As the world gets together, including the Chinese and their secret space vehicles, to bring back their astronaut, you are drawn into the biggest engagement that the world is shown to be in. Believe me, it’s an exhilarating experience. 
Source: Sunday Pioneer, October 4, 2015
 

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