‘The Martian’ is perfect recruitment ad for NASA

“The Martian” is a hugely entertaining sci-fi adventure story about, of all things, problem solving. It also happens to be funny, exciting, and inspirational, but mostly it’s about the joy of watching smart people figuring things out in the face of the most dire of circumstances.

Those circumstances involve a manned mission to Mars. When a killer storm hits their temporary base on the Red Planet, a team of astronauts is forced to abort its mission and head home to Earth. During this emergency evacuation, one of the crew members is swallowed up by the storm and left for dead.

When that astronaut finally regains consciousness, he realizes he’s all alone, abandoned 140 million miles from home. No one at NASA even knows he’s alive.

“Here’s the rub. It’s going to be four years for another mission to reach me. And I’m in a hab designed to last 31 days. So I gotta make water and grow food on a planet where nothing grows. But if I can’t figure out a way to contact NASA, then none of this matters anyway.”

Matt Damon uses all of his natural and easy-going charm to play this astronaut who faces extreme adversity with pluck, ingenuity, and lots and lots of wit.

“So in the face of overwhelming odds, I’m left with only one option. I’m going to have to science the [bleep] out of this.”

And science the “s…” out of it he does. It’s astonishing how compelling a scientist’s survival skills can be when put into motion. Like a MacGyver in space, Damon’s astronaut systematically and methodically goes about doing whatever needs to be done to outlive his supplies, first and foremost, and secondly, make contact with Mother Earth. By the way, this involves much trial and error; the errors providing a surprising amount of humor to the film.

Meanwhile, back on Earth, NASA eventually realizes it has a man still on Mars and goes into overdrive to find a way to rescue him.

The rest of the movie toggles between Damon’s one-man survival show on Mars and NASA’s all-hands-on-deck efforts on Earth to &#8212 as the movie poster proclaims &#8212 Bring Him Home.

Based on a best-selling novel of the same name, “The Martian,” the movie has a refreshingly strong dose of science in its fiction. And crucially, the science never bogs down the plot because Damon’s character is so relatable and colloquial in his explanations. His can-do spirit is charismatic.

“I guarantee you that, at some point, everything is going to go south on you. You’re going to say this is it, this is how I end. Now you can either accept that or you can get to work.”

This movie is obviously not interested in pursuing the philosophical dimensions of “accepting” death. It’s all about the dramatic power of “getting to work.” It may be painstaking and tedious, but it’s the effort that counts. You couldn’t possibly make a better NASA recruitment ad than “The Martian.”

It’s not that the film is without flaws &#8212 it takes an awful long time for NASA to come to some pretty obvious conclusions. It stoops to surprisingly conventional dramatics near the end, and it has an annoyingly jokey disco soundtrack, but those are mere quibbles.

Director Ridley Scott, of “Bladerunner” and “Alien” fame, has created a visually rich and dramatically compelling movie about science and survival.

Who knew science could be so cool?