Matt Damon is lost in space in Ridley Scott’s The Martian

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One of my most anticipated movies of the fall is Ridley Scott’s adaptation of The Martian, and 20th Century Fox is moving full steam ahead with the film’s marketing campaign this week.

Fox dropped an entertaining teaser and a full trailer this week, and today announced it’s moving The Martian up from a Thanksgiving release to Oct. 2, where it no longer has to compete with Pixar’s The Good Dinosaur or the final installment of The Hunger Games.

Based on the best-selling novel by Andy Weir, The Martian follows astronaut Mark Watney (Matt Damon) after he survives a freak accident during a dust storm on Mars. His crew presumes him dead and flees the storm, leaving him stranded on an unfamiliar and often hostile planet. Thankfully, Watney is extremely clever and resourceful, and as he says in the trailer, tries to “science the s*** out of this” and find a way to survive until help arrives.

Some have drawn comparisons between The Martian and other recent space films Interstellar and Gravity, but while all three are set in space, and two share two of the same actors, the similarities end there. The novel has a distinctly different tone, thanks in large part to Watney’s biting sense of humor in the face of adversity. The teaser trailer in particular reflects a similar attitude, and with The Cabin in the Woods director/scribe Drew Goddard responsible for the screenplay, I’m hopeful the film will strike the perfect balance between suspense and laughs.

Check out the teaser below, which introduces us to the crew of the Hermes, including Damon, Jessica Chastain, Kate Mara, Michael Peña, Sebastian Stan and Aksel Hennie.



The full trailer is grander in scope, detailing Watney’s plight and bringing a NASA team determined to rescue him into the fold (played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, Jeff Daniels, Sean Bean, Kristen Wiig, Donald Glover and Mackenzie Davis).

  

My favorite part of the trailer might actually be the tagline at the end – “Help is only 140 million miles away.” It definitely instills a similar sense of high-stakes excitement as another famous tagline for a Ridley Scott space-set tale, Alien’s “In space no one can hear you scream.”

What do you think of the first look at The Martian? Sound off in the comments section.

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