No filmmaker wants his latest masterpiece to compared to a few dozen previous movies, as if he's only mashing up ideas that somebody did before. Ridley Scott's "The Martian" is a refreshing original, based on the inventive Andy Weir novel. It just happens to remind us of 37 or so other movies for various reasons. Here they are (with minor spoilers, but Weir's book has been selling since 2012).

Start with Scott's own "Alien," another outer-space thriller about a determined astronaut's fight for survival against the odds in...