In an early scene in the The Martian, people on Earth realize that an astronaut, Mark Watney, left for dead on the surface of Mars, is still alive. With plaintive music—woodwinds, strings—straining in the background, leaders at NASA debate what to do with that information. How should they save him? Should they even try? As Vincent Kapoor, NASA’s director of Mars operations, points out: “He’s 50 million miles away from home, he thinks he’s totally alone, he thinks we gave up on him—I mean, what does that do to a man, psychologically? What the hell is he thinking right now?”

Cut to Mars, where at that moment Watney—fresh from a shower, with disco beats pulsing the air in his NASA-built habitat—is thinking that he is really, really sick of his soundtrack. “I’m definitely going to die up here if I have to listen to any more of this disco music,” Watney tells his video journal. “My God, Commander Lewis,” he complains to his ABBA-loving crewmate, “couldn’t you have packed anything from this century?”

The answer, sadly for him but delightfully for the rest of us, is no. The Martian’s music, for the most part, is not the stuff of traditional space opera, but something decidedly less epic. In the director Ridley Scott’s sonic vision—an element ported directly and cannily from the plot of the book that inspired the film—the soundtrack of Mars is, for the most part ... disco. So much disco. The worst, which is often also the best, of disco. It’s a running gag throughout the movie that Watney hates the songs (“Starman,” “Love Train,” “Turn the Beat Around,” and other four-on-the-floors) that were left behind on Melissa Lewis’s laptop. He plays them, though, because they are literally all he has to listen to save for his own voice and his own breathing. The songs are also, of course, acoustic connections to Earth. They help keep him sane. And they serve, in their way, as musical versions of the phrase that doubles as a verbal refrain in the film: “Fuck you, Mars.”