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Ridley Scott still remembers, vividly, sitting down in a movie theater, watching the lights go down and experiencing as a gamechanging moment as _2001: A Space Odyssey_ sputtered to life
onscreen. “It had been out less than a week,” the filmmaker recalls, settling into a chair in a cavernous hotel conference room in Toronto. “I sat in theater all by myself in the middle of
the day, in Queensgate, London, with a pack of cigarettes — you could smoke in theaters in those days. It was a brand-new 70mm print, and that cut from the bone to the spaceship, it was
just…it was so majestic.” He closes his eyes for a second, then looks over at author Andy Weir, who’s hanging on his every word. “I’ve either tried to crib from or outright rip off that
movie numerous times in my career,” the filmmaker conspiratorially stage-whispers, “and I’ve never been able to do it quite right — until, possibly, now.” It’s easy to see how the shadow of
Stanley Kubrick’s space-is-the-place epic might loom large over _The Martian,_ Scott’s tale of an astro-botanist named Mark Watney (Matt Damon) left to fend for himself on the Red Planet
after being abandoned during an emergency evacuation. Granted, no Star Child shows up to watch this cosmic Crusoe use his wits and scientific smarts to fight for his life; no singing evil
supercomputer tries to sabotage his team, led by Jessica Chastain, once they realize he’s still alive; and back on Earth, the all-star cast that makes up the movie’s Mission Control response
squad (Chiwetel Ejiofor, Kristen Wiig, Jeff Daniels and a particularly kooky Donald Glover) aren’t getting any help from humming monoliths. [embedded content] EDITOR’S PICKS But along with
a few visual nods, the _Alien_ director’s adaptation of Weir’s self-published Web serial-turned-bestselling novel shares a chin-stroking curiosity and existentialist vibe with its
intellectual sci-fi predecessor. The movie certainly delivers the spills, chills, thrills and even laughs you’d expect from a Hollywood blockbuster, but it also stops to look to the stars
and wonder: What does it mean to be human? Where do we fit in to the big picture? “I mean, it’s _not_ a superhero movie,” Damon says, calling in from Los Angeles a few days earlier. “It’s a
guy-trying-to-survive movie, and done really intelligently. [Screenwriter] Drew Goddard kept calling it ‘a love letter to science’ — it’s all about using ingenuity and knowledge to adapt to
your environment. That, to me, was the key.” The actor hadn’t heard of Weir’s blog-to-Kindle hit novel when he read the script; he just responded to the smarts and the humor, which was
enough to kickstart lengthy discussions with Damon and the screenwriter, who was set to direct. Then Goddard received an offer to helm a dream project — the comic-book project _The Sinister
Six_ — and the project was back-burnered indeifnitely, until Damon heard that Scott was potentially interested. “I literally sprinted over to his office,” he says, laughing. “We had a
five-minute meeting, and then we were both in. I mean, it’s Ridley Scott in space. That’s bucket-list material!”