Film review: ‘Martian’ is lost in space

Matt Damon keeps it simple in science-?deprived ‘Martian'|

Ridley Scott directed the brilliant outer space film “Alien” 35 years ago and keeps climbing back aboard spaceships, despite diminishing returns.

His new 3-D opus “The Martian” has deeper and redder special effects than “Alien,” but none of the atmosphere.

Cheesy science jokes in that style are much appreciated by Mark Watney (Matt Damon), an astronaut on Mars who is happily collecting soil samples until a storm hits and he’s separated from his crewmates, who evacuate the red planet without him.

Watney will have to survive for years on the meager rations left in the space station. He harnesses his doctoral background in botany to grow potatoes fertilized with his own excrement. He rehashes antiquated technology to open a line of communications back to his home planet. But there are limits to Matt Damon’s acting powers – he can’t grow a proper castaway beard.

When not farming, Watney morphs into a sort of latter-day Will Rogers, a video memoirist recording his solitary adventures with so many corny japes he ought to have cultivated maize. He must, as he repeatedly states, “science the s--- out of this,” using the tried and true formulation that a serious statement plus curse word equals funny.

Back on Earth, there are dozens of people and hundreds of millions of dollars invested in bringing Watney home. Jeff Daniels delivers a pleasingly stolid performance as the pragmatic NASA director – the most amusing line in the film might well be his: “Mark Watney is dead.”

And then there’s Jessica Chastain, playing the expedition captain who feels bad about the whole leaving-Watney-for-dead-on-Mars thing, and endeavors to bring her zero-gravity crew back to him. Per genre convention, the advanced mathematics of interplanetary rescues is conveyed using a pen and a stapler and broad statements like “This is space!”

In 1995, “Apollo 13” relied upon human wonder at outer space adventure to carry the narrative. In 2015, nerd culture so thoroughly dominates Hollywood that even the climax of “The Martian” has to be seen through an Avenging lens. Watney does not explain his crazy scheme to rendezvous with his crew through his beloved science, but via a comparison to the suit in “Iron Man.” We get the heroes we deserve.

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“The Martian” is showing at the Sonoma 9 Cinemas. Rated PG-13. Running time 2:26. Visit www.cinemawest.com.

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