Director: Ridley Scott

NASA’s Mars expedition crew member Mark Watney (Matt Damon) is inadvertently left for dead on the red planet by his colleagues, leaving him with the prospect of engaging in scientific and botanic mental gymnastics to save his life. In a rather clumsy, busy and haphazard unestablishing opening sequence, Watney is hit by debris and knocked unconscious, after a sudden storm overtakes the crew of the Ares III on Mars, forcing them to quickly abandon the planet and their mission. Resuming consciousness a day later, Mark hardly wastes a moment in tallying up his supplies, calculating how long it will take a rescue mission to get to him, and before long he’s worked out how he’ll supply himself with food and water to survive the four years until the Ares IV arrives. Meanwhile, back on Earth, and following an implausible series of manufactured gizmo tweaks, our titular hero manages to communicate with his bosses at NASA millions of miles away back home, forcing them to figure out a way to rescue this latter-day Lazarus. The team includes the head of NASA - Teddy Sanders (Jeff Daniels), head of PR Annie Montrose (Kristen Wiig), the man in charge of Mars missions Venkat Kapoor (Chiwetel Ejiofor), the cardigan-wearing and grumpy Englishman in charge of the astronaut crew Mitch Henderson (Sean Bean), the boss of the Jet Propulsion Lab (Benedict Wong) - and between them all, there is quite a lot of nerdy banter. Meanwhile, heading back to Earth is the crew of the Ares III — Melissa Lewis (Jessica Chastain), Beth Johanssen (Kate Mara), Chris Beck (Sebastian Stan), Rick Martinez (Michael Pena), and Alex Vogel (Aksel Hennie).

So - quite a stellar (appropriately) cast, but they’re all criminally under-used, apart from the ever-reliable Matt Damon, on whose shoulders the whole film rests. The script cleverly has Mark creating video logs of his activity, “for the record,” which helps mitigate what is a great deal of exposition and explanation of the various solutions he comes up with, for the variety of problems he faces. Balanced by the character's pleasant sense of humour, and Damon’s effortless charm, this device makes a lot of the technically heavy scientific chatter moderately engaging. The story is completely free of subplots or extraneous threads — instead focussing on Mark on Mars figuring out the next problem to solve, with everyone at NASA doing the same. However it’s a fairly flimsy enterprise, and the once-brilliant Ridley Scott has sadly fallen foul of gross Americanisation. The Scott of old would have clobbered the scriptwriter Drew Goddard for his cliché-obsessional use of the accursed singular ‘you do the Math (sic)’ utterance, as it irritatingly appears eight times in a screenplay that on occasion is heavily contrived, cheesily predictable and clunky in the extreme.

Once it’s established that Mark is smart enough to figure his way out of any given hassle, we’re no longer watching a man struggle against the odds, as much as defy them. That may seem a fine distinction, but it is a crucial one, because it hinders the ability of “The Martian” to connect on any kind of emotional level. While inevitable and wholly unfair comparisons will be made to “Interstellar” (other than being set in space, the two features couldn’t be more different in countless ways), Christopher Nolan’s film, for all its flaws (and it has several), did have a genuinely earned core of moving sensitivity. “The Martian” is more of a distant cousin to Alfonso Cuaron’s “Gravity,” but there too, Cuaron found a deeper layer of feeling beyond the survival story. Those kinds of qualities aren’t generally associated with the films of Ridley Scott, certainly not lately, and it’s an element glaringly missing here that prevents his film from being more than just a technically accomplished adventure yarn. On the plus side, cinematographer Darius Wolski, who worked on Scott’s “Prometheus,” makes the most of being able to open up his colour palette on this outing, creating a rich visual scope for the burnt red of Mars, and the deeper reaches of space. There are other issues with “The Martian” which might well grate on some more than others, including an overused running gag about disco music, and Scott’s seeming inability to know when to finally end the damn thing. The utterly misguided and redundant final scene with Mark Watney explaining the film’s threadbare themes should not have been included.