Ridley Scott’s The Martian features Matt Damon playing the role of US astronaut Mark Watney.  The movie starts with Watney and the rest of his crew exploring Mars; when a storm hits, Watney’s crew assumes he’s dead when they witness him getting hit by flying debris.  However, once the crew is already on their way back to Earth, we find out that Watney is obviously still alive.  When he finds out that everyone is gone, he remains surprisingly calm in this overwhelming situation.  He immediately goes and rations out his crew’s food so that he doesn’t go hungry, and he goes through their supplies to see if there is anything of which he can make use.  He doesn’t stop there, though.  Because he is a botanist, Watney devises a plan to plant potatoes to last him for a long period of time; he also takes steps to contact NASA from Mars, which he does successfully.  NASA devises a plan to bring him supplies, but his crew decides to save him by “catching” the supplies as they slingshot around Earth and head back to Mars.  At the end of the movie, the crew miraculously rescues Watney as he “flies” out of his ship.

The theme of this movie is simple and appears in many other movies—such as Gravity—as well: even though someone is faced with almost impossible odds to survive, human perseverance will always prevail in the end.  This movie takes this idea to the extreme: a man is left on another planet on his own and only has the available supplies and his intellect to allow for continued survival.  The entire situation is against him, but he stays determined: “I am not going to die.”  Everything seems to go his way as he is able to stay alive when he’s hit by debris (despite his suit being punctured), successfully plant his own crops, flawlessly communicate with Earth without any technological problems, and propel himself to the exact location so he can be caught.  Although the theme is unoriginal and his rescue seems highly unlikely given everything that had to go right, I still enjoyed The Martian.  The idea of human perseverance is still inspiring, and the great acting on Matt Damon’s part seems to make the movie’s plot seem plausible.