SNAPSHOT
During a manned mission to Mars, Astronaut Mark Watney (Matt Damon) is presumed dead after a fierce storm and left behind by his crew. But Watney has survived and finds himself stranded and alone on the hostile planet. With only meager supplies, he must draw upon his ingenuity, wit and spirit to subsist and find a way to signal to Earth that he is alive. Millions of miles away, NASA and a team of international scientists work tirelessly to bring “the Martian” home, while his crewmates concurrently plot a daring, if not impossible, rescue mission. As these stories of incredible bravery unfold, the world comes together to root for Watney’s safe return. (official synopsis via Screenrelish)
I am never going to go into space with Matt Damon.
There I’ve said it. It’s out there finally, and I am feel much better now.
Granted, that may sound like a strange declarative statement to make since neither Matt nor I are actual astronauts – I am fairly certain I would’ve remembered that kind of training – and as far as I know Matt, lovely, affable guy that he is, has not expressed any particular desire to be in close quarters with me, in space or otherwise.
But it’s not so strange however when you consider that Matt Damon is once again playing an astronaut stranded out in the middle of galactic nowhere and scrabbling desperately for survival in Ridley Scott’s upcoming film The Martian.
If you recall, he recently played another astronaut in Christopher’s Nolan’s Interstellar, Dr. Mann who emerged from hypersleep on a far distant planet near a ginormous blackhole visited by Matthew McConaughey’s Joseph “Coop” Cooper and Anne Hathaway’s Dr. Amelia Brand only to – SPOILERS! – go completely nutso rogue on his would-be rescuers.
And now here he is again, admittedly a little closer to home, left behind by a hastily-evacuated crew in the face of a fearsomely-destructive storm and forced to “science the shit out of this!” to survive.
And while I have no doubt that he will “science the shit out of this!” in spectacularly-compelling fashion while an anxious population on Earth watches, and his gallant co-crew members, which includes Interstellar co-star Jessica Chastain, Kristen Wiig, Kate Mara, Michael Peña do their best to mount a rescue mission, I fear his spacefaring track record precludes me ever jettisoning into the starry beyond with him.
Far better I think, if he’s going to keep getting marooned in the galactic nether regions, to sit comfortably in my cinema seat while he does his best to make it home in one piece.
At least in The Martian, based on Andy Weir’s 2012 book of the same name which saw the self-published author catapulted into the publishing big league, he has all his marbles happily intact, the wherewithal to have a fighting chance of surviving with little to no supplies and no meaningful back-up, and a can-do attitude that doesn’t involve offing other people to stay alive.
So in other words while his deplorable track record in space remains, he is a way nice guy in this film, a man worth rooting for, the sort of classic, archetypal astronaut that seized the public’s imagination back in 1969 when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon.
And with famed director Ridley Scott at the helm, his desperate quest to get home in the face of insurmountable odds will provide the sort of captivating, engrossing drama that we go to the cinema to see.
But not, I must repeat, into actual space. With Matt Damon. Just so we’re clear.
The Martian opens 25 November 2015 in USA and 26 November in Australia.