It was pretty good timing for NASA to announce they may have found proof liquid water still flows on Mars considering Ridley Scott‘s epic movie about the red planet dropped just a few days later.  Not only did they get to milk the “potential life on Mars” thing again, they also got a huge promo in the form of The Martian, which features Jason Bourne stranded on Mars with nothing but his ability to “science the sh*t” out of things to keep him alive.

Allahpundit covered the trailer back in June, and one of his main concerns was Matt Damon taking the lead role of astronaut Mark Watney.  He felt that an A-lister like Damon who tends to play hyper-competent characters a la Bourne would be seen as certain to survive with ease and thus not somebody with whom the audience could empathize.  The Martian averts that problem by making hyper-competence the standard for the cast rather than the exception.  All of the members of NASA are portrayed as consummate professionals who maintain their composure in the face of adversity and use their knowledge and training to improvise solutions to problems as they come. The film also highlights the harsh realities of traveling to Mars, and it becomes clear very quickly that the only reason Watney has any chance of coming home alive is that these people take their jobs seriously.

In fact, that celebration of competence was the thing I enjoyed the most about the movie.  It’s so much more interesting to watch a smart, confident, and capable person use their wit and will to survive than it is to follow along with some unprepared crybaby as they stumble through a situation beyond their control like Sandra Bullock did in Gravity.  Since Damon does such a great job of making Watney a likable character, it’s really easy to root for him as he figures out ways to overcome the myriad of challenges he faces as a man left for dead on an inhospitable planet, and it’s remarkable just how much the film can convey about this guy when almost all his dialog involves him telling the various recording devices in his Mars habitat what he’s doing and why.

Of course it helps that he’s really funny about it.  AP figured humor would be necessary to make this movie work, and he was right. It just comes from Damon instead of Kristen Wiig, who basically plays one of the NASA bigwigs.  The fact that Watney can joke after nearly blowing himself up makes the scenes where things turn bleak weigh much more heavily because this character obviously does not despair easily.

Speaking of Wiig, she’s one of many in a very large cast that’s really too big to go through one by one here.  All of them hit their marks, though Jeff Daniels does play the head of NASA with a little too much detachment for my taste.  It borders on the “heartless administrator” trope, even though the arguments he makes are quite valid and he’s just as compelled to get Watney home as everyone else is.  It’s just his job is to take the long view of things, and that means the unenviable task of weighing one man’s life against the resources expended in desperate attempts to rescue him.

Long or short, our view from the theater is phenomenal by the way.  Christopher Nolan may have lit up a black hole in Interstellar, but Ridley Scott makes our own backyard look absolutely amazing with how beautifully he shot everything.  By the end of the movie I could only weep for the current state of our space program knowing such a stunning landscape languishes mostly unexplored and we don’t have any big beautiful spacecraft like the one in the movie to get us there.

Scott also keeps things moving along much faster than Nolan did in Interstellar, though sometimes it seemed a bit too quick.  It’s not to the point of The Martian feeling rushed, but it could’ve benefited from a few more minutes of screen time to help even out the pacing a smidge, especially if they could’ve added some more Watney stuff to break up a particularly long section that cuts away from him to handle NASA drama.

For my fellow space geeks, The Martian definitely handles the science better than anything in recent memory.  Like all movies it does cheat a little from time to time and tweak the look of some things to work better on film, but at least there aren’t any magical bookshelves or reappearing Clooneys to worry about in this one.

That may be due to the fact that The Martian is based on the novel by Andy Weir, but unfortunately since I didn’t read the book I can’t tell you how faithful Drew Goddard‘s screenplay is to it.  Even if it’s a radical departure from the source material, it’s still a wonderful movie, especially for people interested in space exploration, and so on Ed Morrissey’s HotAir scale, The Martian racks up an easy 5:

• 5 – Full price ticket
• 4 – Matinee only
• 3 – Wait for Blu-Ray/DVD/PPV rental or purchase
• 2 – Watch it when it hits Netflix/cable
• 1 – Avoid at all costs

Smart, funny, and full of breathtaking visuals, you won’t find many movies better suited to the full theater experience than this one.

The Martian is rated PG-13 for some strong language, injury images, and brief nudity.

For more of what I think about entertainment and politics, follow me on Twitter @crankytrex or check out my other writing at buzzpo.com.