Matt Damon: I Wish I’d Kept My Spacesuit

The film features Matt Damon as astronaut Mark Watney who, when presumed dead on a mission to Mars, has to survive until rescue arrives. How the hell is his Watney going to hold it together on Mars, armed only with those potatoes for nourishment and a clutch of disco tracks for entertainment? There are numerous relationships explored throughout the film – that of family, friends, work colleagues, etc. – but these are secondary to the goal at hand: get Mark Watney home. But Watney manages more than growing crops on Mars (which, he eventually learns, officially means he colonized the planet). All the while, the world is transfixed by the unfolding drama (akin to the Apollo 13 nail-biter), thanks in part to CNN (the happy-to-sell-out, go-to news network Hollywood invariably relies on to lend breaking news coverage verisimilitude to all its fairytales). “He’s on video all the time on these Go Pros. Nobody’s seeing the video feed live, but he’s behaving as if someday someone might”. But then, this guy is an astronaut, so what did we expect? The entire sequence is painfully stagey, with the extras looking distressingly like extras. “I guess I have something in common with most of you here; and that’s the love for science and space, a subject which has always fascinated me, as some of you would have seen in my earlier films”. If it falls short at all, maybe it’s because The Martian lacks the raw, primal power of Alien, or the white-knuckle tension of Gravity, the film it most closely resembles in terms of genre.

“I think the bottom line of both the book and the movie is yes, it is worth doing”, he said.

Chastain, Mara, and Michael Pena are among Watney’s fellow astronauts, while the crew on the ground includes Bean, Ejiofor, Wiig, Jeff Daniels, Donald Glover and Mackenzie Davis.

Stan and Davis were also treated to rides in space vehicles.

NASA hosted a day for the press to take a look behind the scenes at the Johnson Space Center, in preparation for the 20th Century Fox upcoming film, The Martian.

NASA has reason to celebrate the arrival of The Martian. But overall, I appreciate “The Martian’s” vision, boldness and energy – even if it took me to a place in the galaxy I’d already been to, many times before.

In The Martian, viewers get down to bone.