Ridley Scott’s The Martian sticks the landing

Junior-high English teachers looking for boldfaced, extra-literary examples of key narrative principles, take note: This is a big week for man-versus-nature and man-versus-himself conflicts at the movies. Tell the kids.

As my peer Bilge Ebiri notes about Robert Zemeckis’ new The Walk, that bravura ode to will, teamwork and ingenuity toes its tightrope free of any human adversary, and is the better for its zero-evil storytelling. So, too, is The Martian, a conspicuously expert display of high Hollywood tech by a name-brand veteran — Ridley Scott — that also finds ample dramatic heft in leveraging will, teamwork and ingenuity against fear and unforgiving science.

The two movies further share 3-D (superfluous in The Martian), breathtaking scale (thanks to Dariusz Wolski, cinematographer for both), and a central performance by an actor working at peak likability (about whom more in a minute). This is all very much to the good, but the key to The Martian‘s success isn’t its technically astute (if slightly characterless) execution. Rather, what makes Scott’s latest so satisfying is that it keeps virtually no company with his recent failures, chiefly 2012’s punishingly obtuse Prometheus. From its low body count to its Gene Roddenberry-like coda, The Martian plays like little else the director has made.

It does, however, nod to certain canonical works by fellow A-listers, mainly Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity, Ron Howard’s Apollo 13, and Zemeckis’ Cast Away. English teachers, take note again: This is Robinson Crusoe stuff, marbled with exceptionalist American can-do but also with multiculturalism and selfless fraternity — a kind of evolved humanism that feels especially unexpected from the director of Black Hawk Down. (Spoiler-slash-WTF alert: In this paean to U.S.-led futurism, a generous assist from the Chinese government greases a key plot point.) That there seems not to be much prayer among those making the toughest choices is about as dark-hearted as things get in The Martian, but that’s not a complaint: Science is faith here and often more than miracle enough.

Much of the science comes by way of that aforementioned star, Matt Damon, with much of The Martian’s accessibility coming by way of Damon’s aforementioned appeal. But he’s also at maximum acting wattage, thanks to Drew Goddard’s witty screenplay (based on Andy Weir’s approachable novel). Goddard gives him very few scenes with other actors while working fast to establish Damon’s astronaut, Mark Watney, as a classic Everyman of American cinema: tough but vulnerable, wry but not cynical, exceptionally resourceful but not infallible.

We see evidence of these qualities as soon as Watney’s NASA Mars-mission crewmates inadvertently abandon him when they’re forced to bug out. This is a scientist who can doctor himself in an emergency — a bit of minor self-surgery that faintly echoes Noomi Rapace’s auto-abortion in Prometheus. Watney, having surveyed his dire situation, immediately begins to document his challenges and setbacks through a series of Skype-like video-log dispatches — a neat device that gives Damon room to roam. It also gives the audience a smart layer or two of meta: Our protagonist is now an amateur filmmaker working inside a slick Hollywood entertainment, and he roots for himself to beat the odds with all the fervor of someone watching Rocky. (Watney himself prefers Happy Days — a sideways nod to Howard, perhaps.)

Watney is alone, but the movie is full of concerned scientists and bureaucrats, played with winning depth and conviction by (in no order except what my memory dictates) Jeff Daniels, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Sean Bean, Michael Peña, Donald Glover, Mackenzie Davis, Benedict Wong, Jessica Chastain and Kristen Wiig. None of them have a whole lot to do, but each makes his or her character distinctive without resorting to tics. Teamwork is stressed, but most of the interactions take place among groups of two or three, making this sometime-in-the-future reconstitution of NASA feel both 21st-century global and Camelot clubby. (Maybe because Daniels is fresh off The Newsroom, these bring-him-home scenes sometimes have an off-brand Aaron Sorkin flavor, the zing-to-busyness ratio not quite lab quality.)

We could also be watching studio meetings on the subject of making a star-driven blockbuster, with those talks cutting back to the star, not waiting around to be saved but instead pushing on, surviving as long as he can. Then again, it’s hard to imagine a roomful of suits green-lighting a big-FX one-botanist-against-Mars movie, with moon-eyed optimism the takeaway. Yet somehow it happened — and happened on Ridley Scott’s watch. IMDB says he’s already on to more Alien prequel-sequel things. But maybe someone can at least look to The Martian as an example of another way to make an ambitious, satisfying studio picture.