Ridley Scott’s The Martian is occasionally very funny, but it definitely isn’t a comedy. That’s worth mentioning, because there was an uproar when the acclaimed sci-fi blockbuster landed Golden Globe nominations for Best Picture and Best Actor in the Musical or Comedy categories, which felt like a way to shoehorn it into the mix more than anything else.
As it turned out, the literary adaptation wound up being shortlisted for those exact same awards at the Oscars anyway, two of seven nods in total. When you add that onto Rotten Tomatoes critical and user scores that are perfectly in sync at 91 percent, on top of a $630 million box office haul against a budget of $108 million, we’re talking about one of the best and most successful intergalactic epics of the modern era.
The plot is simple in practice, with Matt Damon’s Mark Watney left behind to fend for himself on Mars when the rest of his team flees the planet after an incident they believed resulted in his death. Becoming a one-man colonization mission, everyone back home is shocked when they discover that the titular cosmic interloper isn’t just surviving, but thriving on the red planet.
Naturally, a rescue mission is put into action as soon as possible, with time fast running out as Watney does his best to acclimatize to being the single living soul on a barren space rock. The Martian endures as an impeccable slice of high concept sci-fi escapism, with streaming subscribers continuing to check it out in huge numbers to this day, with FlixPatrol providing the evidence that Scott and Damon’s fantastic collaboration is currently orbiting the global charts on Google Play Movies.