It’s no secret that we’re big fans of Andy Weir’s novel The Martian here at Ars—the (mostly) realistic sci-fi survivalist story swept the Ars Orbiting HQ late last year to much internal acclaim. It was a treat to interview Weir himself about the book’s success and his future plans, if for no other reason than how much Weir resembles protagonist Mark Watney in character and attitude.
In the interview, Weir dropped some details on us about the book’s movie adaptation, which is penned by screenwriter Drew Goddard and directed by none other than legendary filmmaker Ridley Scott (Blade Runner, Alien, and a ton of other movies). Due out in November of this year, the movie stars Matt Damon as Watney—a casting choice that left a lot of folks skeptical at first. However, at the time, Weir defended Damon as Watney. "A lot of people forget how good an actor Matt Damon is," Weir told Ars. "Remember, he can do 'smartass' really well, as we saw in Good Will Hunting!"
On Sunday afternoon, the world got its first official glimpse of the smartass in action, with the release of The Martian’s first teaser video:
The teaser takes the form of an in-universe "video diary" showing Watney and the rest of the crew of the fictional Ares 3 mission preparing to leave for their trip to Mars on the spacecraft Hermes. Somewhat presciently, it starts out with Watney briefly struggling to set up a video camera—something he’ll likely be doing with great regularity once he finds himself marooned on Mars.
After a brief introduction, Watney introduces the other members of the Ares 3 mission, including mission commander Lewis (played by Jessica Chastain, who along with Damon recently starred in Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar). The video is overlaid with pop-up factoids and Twitter-like interjections and trending topics from the public, some of which contain nods to other works of science fiction (when German astronaut Vogel first appears, played by Norwegian Aksel Hennie, one tweet asks "Vogel has to be the #synthetic right"—a reference to Ridley Scott’s Alien).
The video functions as a great way to show off the space-borne side of the movie’s ensemble cast, which also includes House of Cards actor Kate Mara. Several of the film’s biggest names, though, have yet to make an appearance—including Sean Bean as flight director Mitch Henderson, Kristen Wiig as NASA PAO director Annie Montrose, Chiwetel Ejiofor as Ares mission director Venkat Kapoor, and Jeff Daniels as NASA administrator Teddy Sanders.
The style of slickly produced fictional promotional material mirrors the tack taken by Ridley Scott with his 2012 film Prometheus, which also featured similar videos—like this ad for your very own David android, or a TED talk from 2023 about artificial intelligence. With The Martian, it appears very likely that this is only the first in a string of video diaries chronicling the Ares 3 flight to Mars in near real time—pilot Rick Martinez explains to Watney that the trip is scheduled to take 150 days, and the film is as of today 170 days from release.
We have high hopes that the film version of The Martian will be as good as the book—in fact, if I can be permitted a brief bit of editorializing, I’m actually looking forward to The Martian more than I’m looking forward to J. J. Abrams’ Star Wars film, which will be released only a few weeks after The Martian.
Ars has also reached out to author Andy Weir to see if he has any thoughts on the Mark Watney video diary, and if he’s able to get back to us, we’ll post his reply.
Update: At roughly the same time this story went live, 20th Century Fox posted the movie's first full trailer, which shows off a lot more of the movie, including Watney's Martian digs.
Also, author Andy Weir has gotten back to us with a quote: "I'm thrilled with the promotional video and with the trailer," he said to Ars. "I'm especially happy with how Matt Damon has captured Mark's character." Straight from the author's mouth—or at least his keyboard.
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