The Martian– Film Review V2.0 by Frances Winston

Directed by: Ridley Scott

Starring: Matt Damon, Jessica Chastain, Kristen Wiig, Jeff Daniels, Michael Peña, Kate Mara, Sean Bean, Sebastian Stan, Aksel Hennie, Chiwetel Ejiofor

In cinemas 30th September

With all the talk of NASA’s discovery of water on Mars this seems a rather timely release. Based on the best selling book of the same name by Andy Weir in a nutshell it tells the story of an astronaut stranded on Mars when his team presume him dead. Using his wits and his scientific knowledge he struggles to survive. Savaging his teams base he manages to make contact with NASA which then leads to an international race against time in order to bring their man home.

Matt Damon plays the title character Mark Watney and clearly has great fun in the role. Rather than play him with a sense of pathos he injects huge amounts of humour into his performance and even in the depths of despair manages to find something to make himself smile. He is basically a space version of Tom Hanks character in Castaway and while he doesn’t carry the whole movie on his own if his performance was lax it would drag the whole picture down. Thankfully he finds the right balance of gravitas and hopefulness and you are rooting for him from very early on.

All of the supporting cast give strong performances especially Ejiofor and Bean who both become completely emotionally invested in saving Watney. Surprisingly the weakest performance here is from the usually reliable Chastain with Wiig being a revelation in a straight role.

The scenes on Mars look stunning and provide a nice contrast to the far more sombre scenes on earth and the whole thing is tied together with (of all things) a disco soundtrack. In another plus apparently most of the science featured here stands up and the movie even garnered the approval of Professor Brian Cox.

This manages to be thrilling, nail biting and yet funny all at once and is a nice twist on the standard survival and rescue tale. Great fun, gorgeous to look at and with heaps of heart this is a must see on the big screen in order to get the full impact of the visuals.