Access to The Martian’s Toronto premiere required Ars Technica to allow 20th Century Fox to pay for airfare and hotel. We’re new to the hands-on film review scene, but this is standard practice in the film world. We’re attempting to figure out the best way to handle this, but in this case as we ramp up our movie coverage, we have allowed Fox to cover our costs so that we could bring you this review along with other reporting from the premiere.

Movie adaptations from books—especially beloved books—can be frightening things. Reading is a deeply personal act, where we take in words and build worlds inside of our minds where only we can experience them. Seeing a movie based on a book is almost like going on a blind date with someone you’ve known intimately through letters but never actually seen. That first meeting isn’t always a good one, because when beheld with your for-real eyes and ears, the person you see and hear isn’t necessarily going to be anything like the version of the person you thought you knew.

Fortunately, The Martian, is a good blind date. Screenwriter Drew Goddard has translated Andy Weir’s novel into a script that keeps almost all of the science and humor intact, and director Ridley Scott allows the vast emptiness of Mars to speak for itself, while keeping the gimmicks to a minimum.

And, of course, Matt Damon does wonders for the role of Mark Watney—the best botanist on the planet. The planet of Mars.

Doing science, still alive

The Martian, for those not familiar, is a tale set in the not-too-distant future. It tells the story of astronaut Mark Watney, who is left stranded on Mars when his Ares 3 crewmates have to abort their month-long stay on the surface because of a severe storm. Watney is gravely injured in the evacuation and the other Ares crew, believing him dead, leave without him.

The primary fear Ars readers have expressed about the film is that it would screw up the very thing that made the book great: the mostly-plausible science. The meticulously researched problems that writer Andy Weir threw at Watney—and the creative, swear-word laced solutions to those problems—were what rocketed the book to legitimate best-seller status. And, of course, complex science problems that require a page or two of background often don’t translate at all to the big screen, where “show, don’t tell” is a major rule.

But the movie gets it right. Though truncated for time, most of the major scenes in the book are present and recognizable, with science intact. In order to stretch his food supply, Watney grows potatoes on Mars (and those are in fact real potatoes on screen, according to Matt Damon). To make water, Watney pulls hydrogen out of extra hydrazine fuel and burns it. His long rover trek to Schiaparelli Crater—a huge focus in the book’s third act—is mostly intact.

And, of course, Mark Watney is Mark Watney—the f-bomb dropping pirate-botanist king of Mars. Fears that Matt Damon lacked the charisma to pull off the role are completely unfounded, and he turns in a standout performance as an interplanetary Robinson Crusoe.

More alone than any human has ever been

By the end of the film—no spoilers, don’t worry—Watney has spent close to two years on Mars. Author Andy Weir—who was kind enough to talk to Ars at length last November and who also hung out with us at the movie’s world premiere in Toronto—previously explained to us that he wanted to write a science story, not a character study in crippling depression, and so he deliberately wrote Mark Watney as a resourceful fellow with an almost inhuman amount of optimism and resolve. Even when faced with repeated catastrophes and setbacks, book-Watney is always ready to sleep on a problem and then doggedly narrate his solution.

Director Ridley Scott chose to go in a slightly different way with the film. So much of the book relies on the audience having access to Watney’s internal monologue (because so much of the book is composed of Watney’s journal writings), and heavy narration in movies is a dramatic device that rarely works. So, we get to hear Watney’s thoughts via video logs that he keeps—but we also get to see Watney in a way that we can’t in the novel.

Scott paints Mars almost as a contemporary twin to the planetoid on which the Nostromo crew lands in his 1979 film Alien (the world is referred to as “LV-426” in Aliens, but it has no name in the first film). The orchestral musical cues subtly echo Jerry Goldsmith’s haunting score from that film, and Mars is shown in all its inhospitable vastness—often with that vastness juxtaposed against a very small and very insignificant Watney. Alien visual designer and Swiss surrealist H.R. Giger said in his Giger’s Alien art book that he thought of the planetoid in that movie as his own biomechanical world; Ridley Scott’s Mars is the sunlit antipode of that world, while still retaining a tremendous sense of indifference to the doings of humankind.

High flight

There’s much more going on in the film than just Watney stuck on Mars, of course, and even cast members who have few lines turn in solid performances. The rest of the Ares 3 crew—led by Jessica Chastain’s Commander Melissa Lewis—show off excellent space chops, and the scenes on the ground with NASA paint the agency and its people with one of the kindest brushes in recent memory. This is a movie in which NASA plays a central role—and that’s perhaps one of the most interesting aspects of the story.

After all, this isn’t the cash-strapped agency we see today, but rather a near-future version of NASA that’s been granted the funds to undertake an entire series of five manned Mars landings. Scott’s fictionalized take on the Johnson Space Center is glorious (if a bit silly—in real life, JSC looks mostly like a run down college campus), and the Jet Propulsion Lab gets a large amount of positive screen time.

This might be The Martian’s greatest draw—not showing science done right, but showing science being done right by the best version of NASA. This NASA is the space agency that we all dream of. It’s the modern reincarnation of the group of people who landed 12 humans on the moon and built a filter out of spare parts and on any given day would do a hundred things we have only dreamed of.

In interviews before the show, castmembers explained that the message of The Martian is survival, but to me, the message was hope. A hope that we can be better than what we are. A hope that we one day might actually choose to go to Mars and do the other things—because even though they are hard, there are unlimited rewards in both the journey and the destination.

The Martian works on film. The science is there. The acting is there. The film invokes emotions by showing people forced to survive in extraordinary situations—and that, after all, is a central tenet to space travel. After the loss of the space shuttle Columbia, president Bush spoke these words, and they apply just as much to the fictional Ares 3 crew as they do to NASA’s real astronaut corps:

This cause of exploration and discovery is not an option we choose—it is a desire written in the human heart. We are that part of creation which seeks to understand all creation. We find the best among us, send them forth into unmapped darkness, and pray they will return. They go in peace for all mankind, and all mankind is in their debt.

But The Martian is far more than just Cast Away in space, a grim treatise on pure survival. As the lights dimmed for the premier, director Ridley Scott had one final bit of advice for the audience. “Remember to laugh,” Scott told us, “because this film is actually quite funny.”

We’ll have one more piece on The Martian (which hits theaters at large on October 2) coming later this weekend, featuring interviews with the cast, crew, and production team. Stay tuned!