The Mar­t­ian

In space, no-one can hear you LOL. But even so, you LOL any­way, right into the lit­tle GoPro you have ensconced in your astro yurt, even though your chances of you being fero­cious­ly sucked into a void of infi­nite noth­ing­ness and trans­formed into a cloud of com­e­dy ash are high-to-like­ly. And then when things go wrong, your prospects are dim, you just LOL some more. Lift your­self right back up, gawp into that lit­tle lens like a bray­ing loon-bag (or seedy YouTube vlog­ger), roll your eyes and crack wise like the best of ​’em.

The Mar­t­ian, based on the 2011 nov­el by Andy Weir, is the sto­ry of Mark Wat­ney (Matt Damon), a sharp-shoot­ing NASA botanist who, in an air­ship-sized sna­fu that is the result of some kind of freak space hur­ri­cane, is left strand­ed on Mars with noth­ing but a tray of spuds, a Mars rover and set of pin-sharp sur­vival instincts that would make Bear Grylls go all slack in the trouser region. Even though he’s many mil­lion miles away from the good ol’ US of A, the lab boys back home are fig­ur­ing a way to get their man back safe­ly. They talk. In rooms. About ​“mak­ing things hap­pen.” Mon­ey is no object. ​“I’ve checked the math – it works!” they say.

What­ev­er it takes to suc­ceed in their mis­sion and save face against a sav­age media. Wat­ney believes that when cri­sis strikes, you mustn’t lie back and accept your grim fate – you must seize the moment, solve that prob­lem, crunch that num­ber, grab adver­si­ty by the wind­pipe and gar­rote it to death with a exten­sion cable. And that is what this film is about. If you’re some­one of a less wide-eye­d/af­fir­ma­tive dis­po­si­tion, well… you might have some queries with this one.

It’s strange to see a big-bud­get sci-fi movie aimed explic­it­ly at a fam­i­ly audi­ence, and the film plays like how-to sur­vival tac­tics TV, only on a mas­sive­ly overblown scale. Though there is some very mild scat­o­log­i­cal humour, props to Scott for not going all 127 Hours on us and hav­ing Damon glug back a pouch of his own urine. Wat­ney inno­vates to sur­vive, though direc­tor Rid­ley Scott doesn’t real­ly have the time or incli­na­tion to actu­al­ly explain what he’s doing or how he’s doing it. Instead, the video diary acts as a cheap expo­si­tion out­let, and then to save time we only have to see the upshot, which will either result in dis­as­ter or tri­umph – each even­tu­al­i­ty, you’ll be pleased to hear, result­ing in a hard-earned LOL.

We should at this point get on to the nature of the LOLs them­selves. Much of the film’s humour (rough esti­mate: 90 per cent?) involves say­ing how bad dis­co music is. Yet it is inter­est­ing that Wat­ney con­ducts his busi­ness like he’s a cabaret per­former in front of an audi­ence, or being broad­cast live on tele­vi­sion. He’s char­ac­terised as an irre­press­ible super­hero lunk who wears his vast knowl­edge base very light­ly, and his relent­less­ly chip­per atti­tude does make it hard for you to care whether he lives or dies. And that’s not out of mal­ice, just the fact that in genre cin­e­ma of this type, it’s always the jok­er of the pack who’s first against the wall. Also, from the tonal out­set of the film, Scott does absolute­ly noth­ing to sug­gest that there’s any real dan­ger of him being crisped up and oblit­er­at­ed, and so its final hour Big Mad Res­cue Mis­sion offers the inevitable flat-pack func­tion­al­i­ty of an Ikea wardrobe.

The rai­son d’etre of a sur­vival film is to at least force the spec­ta­tor to think that the hero isn’t going to make it, but this is very much a soft­ly-soft­ly adven­ture yarn with the hard edges sand­ed off. Ten­sion is kept to a min­i­mum in favour of rais­ing the quo­tient of up-with-peo­ple prob­lem solv­ing mon­tages. Scott has amassed a gigan­tic, Alt­man-sized cast for this movie, but he squan­ders most of them with a line or two, often fol­lowed by a mild­ly com­ic reac­tion shot. Even the crew who left Wat­ney behind, head­ed up by Jes­si­ca Chastain’s dis­pas­sion­ate Melis­sa Lewis, appear to feel no remorse or guilt. And on top of that, it’s hard to under­stand what’s pow­er­ing their instincts – they want to save Mark, but is it because they love him and want him to live, or is it because they’re in NASA and this is how they do things in NASA?

It’s a film that would pass the time on a rainy Sun­day after­noon, and if you hap­pen to find Matt Damon to be god’s gift to charm­ing bas­tards, well then you might want to book ear­ly for this one. Yet, it’s not about any­thing at all. It has noth­ing to say. No state­ments to make. Not about our place in the solar sys­tem, not about the fragili­ty of the human body, not about how humans are hard-wired for self-preser­va­tion, not about col­lec­tive ver­sus indi­vid­ual endeav­our, not about why it’s impor­tant that we vis­it oth­er plan­ets. It says don’t wor­ry, be hap­py – and Bob­by McFer­rin already said that in 1988.