First, I need to point out there are no actual martians in this movie, that is no actual life forms of sentient or otherwise in this movie native to the planet Mars. We do not even have Ray Walston, Christopher Lloyd, or any actor who has played a Martian in any previous movie. I just included this caveat in case you thought this was a production of the Discovery Channel or NASA.
Matt Damon is the title character and one of a group of astronauts visiting the Red Planet. Strangely, a storm appears which threatens the group and KO’s Damon. The Astronauts take off in the rocket and leaves Damon behind, no doubt because he tried to murder Matthew McConaughey in Interstellar.
Damon is severely injured, but he makes it back to the abandoned base and fixes himself up with a Band Aid and a stiff drink. Here’s the good news and the bad news. It seems there is a convenient rocket booster that can put him in orbit and there is supposed to be a return mission in a few months, that is if NASA really thinks it is worth coming back. So the deal is that Damon just has to stay alive for a while.
Well, being a botanist he should have no trouble securing power, life support, and finding a way to signal Earth. As Nietzsche said, that which does not kill me turns me into McGyver. Of course there is the problem of food. The Mars Wendy’s and Pizza Hut isn’t expected to open soon. But Damon decides a potato farm might be a good idea after watching a particular scene from Lord of the Rings that suggests the virtue of the vegetable “boiled, mashed, stuck in a stew.”
Earth finally figures out that the astronauts forgot someone, but they don’t tell the returning astronauts. You know how it is. Everyone would want to go back, and its not like they could just turn the Millennium Falcon around and easily go get him. Then there would be questions and they would find out about Damon’s pootatoe farm. I don’t want to go into details here. This is the most disgusting part of the movie. I mean there should have been enough Marzipan or Marzetti to keep him alive without Damon doing what he did.
We could have ended things here except for all the wanted posters. You sort of figure with all the BRING HIM HOME posters they would not get away with just leaving Damon on Mars. That would be the sensible, logical, and practical thing to do, but we could not just say “Dang, I knew we forgot something”.
To this point, we have kept the obvious movie clichés to a minimum but you just know that
1. A resupply rocket will fail.
2. The returning astronauts will be told to hold to a normal landing on Earth
3. The astronauts will abort the Earth landing
4. NASA will send them supplies for the rescue even though they were ordered not to go back to Mars
5. The rescue will be so improbable that in a real world situation everyone would die. Of course the same thing could be said about the movie Gravity, but there the director did admit that some facts were “adjusted” to make the story work. At least Sandra Bullock didn’t try to make us believe you could use explosives on the airlock to change the orbit of the return craft.
Yes this movie needed wanted posters. Wanted by the physics police, or at least for an episode of Mythbusters. Yes, I liked the movie, yet I fervently hope Mars will never become the new Idaho.
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