10 Reasons The Martian Is Ridley Scott's Comeback

3. It Achieves What Interstellar Couldn't

Christopher Nolan's Interstellar, for all of its admirable technical craft, was something of an ambitious mess. It wanted to be a hard sci-fi film but also wrestle with heady metaphysical ideas, and the results were hugely divisive. The Martian by contrast is an example of a film that knows its limits, and while it could easily have taken a similar left-turn into the fantastical, it grounds itself and remains tethered to some degree of scientific plausibility. Interstellar wanted to make us as a species look up at the stars again and wonder what was out there, but really, Scott's film has done a far more successful job of that. With its focus on the collective human effort of attempting to bring Watney home and demonstrating how far we as a species have come, it's a far more hopeful and heartfelt advertisement for the space program, steering clear of silliness and narrative bloat. Though it may be a far more straight-forward story, it achieves it goals far more convincingly, and makes us think of space not as a confusing headache but a wondrous expanse to be explored.