Out from the blackness comes something we thought we might never see again: a decent Ridley Scott movie.

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The Martian, Scott’s adaptation of the best-selling book by Andy Weir, is a knockabout space adventure. A wide-eyed tribute to human ingenuity that packs enough snark to pull itself out of the black hole of earnestness, even if its fuel runs out partway through.

Matt Damon stars as astronaut Mark Watney, left for dead on Mars after his crew are forced to flee a dust storm. Stranded with only enough food and water to last a month, he’ll have to (in his words) “science the shit” out of the situation to survive. He gets to work: burning hydrogen to produce water, rationing his remaining food stocks and growing more by terra-forming Mars with his poo. Back on earth a sharp-eyed satellite controller (Mackenzie Davis) notices Watney’s to-ing and fro-ing and alerts her superiors – A-type NASA suits played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, Jeff Daniels and Kristen Wiig. They’ll wrangle with the moral conundrum of whether or not to tell the rest of Watney’s crew (led by Jessica Chastain’s mission commander) that he’s still alive and risk them turning back to help him.

Weir is a space nut who once designed software to plot a successful course to the red planet and The Martian is sci-fi leaning heavy on the science. His book - self-published before it became a hit on Kindle, then stormed the best-seller charts – is research-heavy. It doesn’t spare his readers any of the cosmic nuts and bolts. All of the specialist lexicon makes it into Drew Goddard’s script, but so too does Watney’s sardonic streak, delivered in some style by Damon. He’s a tough character to pilot, this sceptical geek know-it-all, but Damon has the charm and wit to land some tricky one-liners. You try making “Fuck you, Mars” sound cool.

A galaxy of stars orbit Damon with very little to do. Ares III, Watney’s crew’s ship, is home to a pilot (Michael Peña), a navigator (Kate Mara) and a chemist (Aksel Hennie), but they’re all, despite their talents, fairly unremarkable. Back on earth Wiig’s PR specialist is sort of spiky, Ejiofor’s mission controller is a bit nice and Daniels’ NASA boss is a bit nasty. Even Watney, supposedly a symbol of hope for all humanity in the final act, is - once the quips wear off - pretty dull. Still, Scott has a lightness of touch that was absent from The Martian’s closest recent companion: Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar. That theory-heavy behemoth, which also starred Chastain and Damon, makes Scott’s film feel light as air.

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With Alien, Scott went to space and found horror. With Prometheus he came back having caught something horrible (although, interestingly, the space suits in that wonky misadventure and this new film are very similar). The Martian floats between them. It is not fantastic, in either sense, but it does show-off a sense of play. For a survival flick it’s actually pretty light on peril (you never really believe that the Jordanian desert, where the film was shot, is Mars), but it’s not short of thrills.

It’s also a giant boon for NASA. Space exploration here is nothing but noble, exciting and worthwhile. Mark Watney, urging his space rover along through the plains of the Acidala Planitia, is pursuing a new manifest destiny. A sucrose coda (added, unnecessarily, to book’s matter-of-fact finale) suggests that we’d be fools not to follow him.