
Gradually, the two stories become one as Watney and everyone else gets to work. The Earth scenes interrupt these solitary interludes with other faces and voices, keeping the narrative jumping, but they also assert that no matter how lost and seemingly forgotten, no one is alone because to be human fundamentally is to exist with other people. Like these other marooned souls (including the 1964 “ Robinson Crusoe on Mars”), Watney is physically and psychologically apart, but even before he pings Earth with his big news, you know people are mourning him. (On Monday, scientists announced that signs of liquid water could be seen in photographs taken on Mars by a camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, timing that suggests NASA certainly has the whole cross-promotion thing down.)Īlthough Watney is isolated at first, with no means of communicating with Earth, the parallel narrative means that he’s never truly alone, unlike, say, Crusoe (before Friday) or Tom Hanks’s character in “Cast Away” (before Wilson), whose profound isolation is critical to how you experience them and their stories.

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It also serves as a nice plug for NASA, which has returned the favor by pushing the movie on its website. Hands down it’s also the funniest, loosest and most optimistic of the group, at once an ode to far-out adventuring and to terra-firma home, a sweeping, old-fashioned entertainment and a plaintive portrait of solitude as both a creative necessity and a danger. This is the third of his films - after “Alien” in 1979 and “Prometheus” in 2012 - set beyond the dark side of the moon. Perhaps that’s one reason Ridley Scott keeps returning to deep space.
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For this accidental castaway, space is the place where he’s physically marooned, but also where his mind is set free - a dynamic that of course invokes moviegoing itself.

At once epic and intimate, it involves a dual journey into outer and inner space, a trip that takes you into that immensity called the universe and deep into the equally vast landscape of a single consciousness. A space western and a blissed-out cosmic high, “The Martian” stars Matt Damon as an American astronaut who, like a latter-day Robinson Crusoe, learns to survive on his own island of despair.
