Movie Review: The Martian

This movie does live up to the hype and the movie trailers and the anticipated special effects. The director Ridley Scott , who is most famous for many of his space movies starting with Alien in 1979 directed this movie about a group of Astronauts who have to suddenly leave Mars because of a very bad storm that hits the area where they have been living. During the evacuation, one Astronaut played by Matt Damon is impaled by an antenna and knocked some distance from the space ship that would have taken all 6 of them off of the planet. The remaining 5 astronauts believe that Matt Damon’s character has been killed and some months later it is discovered that he not only survived but is continuing to survive on his own on the planet by grown his own potato plants. Too much of the movie is devoted to the mostly boring planting of the potato plants and the difference science Damon’s character uses to survive eventually finding the first Mars space probe from 1997 and even the small space car that dug for soil samples so many years earlier. Its this 1997 space probe that provides the method how Damon can communicate with earth and begin the long process to save his life and return home.

The year this movie takes place is not really made that clear, unless I missed that somewhere, but the science and technology seems to be about 10 years in the future. I wonder if the current group of people trying to go to Mars for life will watch this film and change their mind about going. As they say in the movie, there about a million things that can go wrong on any mission to Mars.

The ending of this movie was not good enough and involved some Hollywood drama that was rather ridiculous for dramatic effect. A decision was made to put a bomb on the spaceship in order to link with Damon’s spaceship to somehow make up the distance between the two spaceships. I thought this ending was rather stupid and not up to the quality of the rest of this movie.

I highly recommend this movie despite the unsatisfactory ending.

The Martian IMDB