The Odyssey is every bit the epic film we all expected. In its opening weekend, the movie brought in $264.1 million internationally, and most of the credit is rightfully going to Christopher Nolan, who wrote and directed the film. However, Matt Damon also deserves a great deal of praise for leading such a star-studded cast and for playing the legendary Odysseus as a relatable, guilt-plagued hero. Presumably because of the success of The Odyssey, another truly great Matt Damon movie has entered Prime Video’s top 10 streaming movies, currently sitting at number 6, according to Flix Patrol.
Directed by Ridley Scott, The Martian is a 2015 film written by Drew Goddard (Cloverfield, Daredevil), based on a novel by Andy Weir (Project Hail Mary). The film takes place in 2035 and begins with a NASA mission to Mars. Dr. Mark Watney (Damon) is a botanist on the mission who becomes stranded on Mars and presumed dead when a severe dust storm sends the rest of the crew packing. Having to escape Mars in a hurry thanks to the storm, Watney is left behind. The next NASA mission scheduled to go to Mars is four years away, so Watney seeks to make use of the limited supply of provisions in NASA’s Mars habitat until then. He also makes use of a video diary to chronicle his survival.
Tonally similar to Project Hail Mary, which is based on another Andy Weir novel, The Martian tackles themes of survival and isolation in outer space. While those are weighty subjects, The Martian handles them with a lot of heart and humor thanks largely to Damon’s sharply funny character. One particularly memorable sequence features Watney cultivating a potato garden by using the waste from himself and his crewmates that were left on Mars from the mission. The movie’s humor, though, did lead to one memorable bit of controversy about the film. At the 2016 Golden Globes, The Martian won the award for “Best Musical or Comedy” against the films Spy, Trainwreck, Joy, and The Big Short. Matt Damon also won for Best Performance in a Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy. This was met with ire by comedy fans especially, as The Martian, while containing comedic moments, was much more of a drama than a comedy, which many felt gave it an unfair advantage over the comedy films it competed with.
A decade later, however, the dust has settled on The Martian‘s comedy controversy. The film is now received much the way it was when it was first released, and before it was nominated for anything. Sort of like an outer space version of Cast Away — which is also quite funny, but not a comedy — The Martian is a feel-good movie about the endurance of the human spirit. The difference is that it’s infused into the space genre, something Scott helped define decades earlier with Alien. Few actors are so good that they can be completely compelling while spending long stretches of a movie entirely alone, but Damon was more than up for the task in The Martian, just like he was up for playing Odysseus in The Odyssey.
The Martian is available to stream on Prime Video.
