The Martian

it’s castaway in space, as matt damon gets stranded on the red planet

Matt Damon should really stop going into space. Every time he does ( Interstellar, The Martian), he gets lost/stranded and ends up costing NASA millions of dollars in fraught rescue attempts.

In The Martian, he plays botanist Mark Watney, one of six astronauts tasked with bringing back samples from the surface of Mars. While there, Watney is hit by flying debris during a storm and is thrown out of sight of his crew. His life signs go dead, leaving the crew to presume him killed, abort their mission (in order to survive) and head home.

But Watney isn’t dead. When he regains consciousness, he finds himself alone on the planet, with a space suit low on oxygen, and little equipment to guide him back to base. He realises that any hope of rescue is years away, so to survive he’ll need to “science the shit out of this”. And he does, thinking up a longterm plan that centres on growing potatoes in fertiliser made from his teammates’ poop, and constructing a comms device to contact NASA.

Backed by a thoroughbred cast, The Martian is an unsettling, but at times funny, lost-in-space drama. We feel Watney’s despair at being stranded, squirm under the weight of his fight to survive, and rally as the very big, very dangerous rescue attempt gets underway.