The Martian
Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation | Release Date: October 2, 2015 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
80
METASCORE
Generally favorable reviews based on 46 Critic Reviews
Positive:
40
Mixed:
6
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
100
Wall Street JournalJoe MorgensternOct 2, 2015
What’s so fascinating about the film is that it truly turns on the solving of problems, and its chief solver, stuck on Mars, manages to be so funny, interesting and infallibly likable that you’re invested in his predicament at every moment. Read full review
100
HitfixDrew McWeenySep 12, 2015
It takes a genuine master craftsman to take something as complex and difficult as this and make it look easy, but it also takes an artist with a great ear to take something as dense with exposition as this is and make it practically sing. Read full review
91
Tampa Bay TimesSteve PersallOct 1, 2015
Ridley Scott's The Martian is a brainy blockbuster, melding genuine science and fiction into a rare popcorn epic that actually makes you feel smarter for watching. Read full review
91
Entertainment WeeklyChris NashawatySep 29, 2015
Scott’s sci-fi adventure is the kind of film you leave the theater itching to tell your friends to see. Like Apollo 13 and Gravity, it turns science and problem solving into an edge-of-your-seat experience. Read full review
90
New York Magazine (Vulture)David EdelsteinOct 2, 2015
The Martian is shot, designed, computer-generated, and scripted on a level that makes most films of its ilk look slipshod. Scott and writer Drew Goddard aren’t trying to make an “important” sci-fi movie like Interstellar. They aim lower but blow past their marks. Read full review
90
SalonAndrew O'HehirOct 1, 2015
You can argue that the plot of The Martian doesn’t offer many surprises, but this is a movie of innumerable delightful moments and small discoveries, and even more of infectious enthusiasm. Read full review
90
Los Angeles TimesKenneth TuranOct 1, 2015
The Martian is a film that respects the geekiest among us, and that pays off all around. Read full review
90
TheWrapAlonso DuraldeSep 30, 2015
Perhaps most importantly, not only does the film stress the importance of using math and physics and botany and chemistry to solve problems, but it also makes a plot based on scientific inquiry and audacity just as exciting and even more unpredictable as the movies’ usual brand of problem-solving, the kind that involves punching everyone and then blowing everything up. Read full review
90
VarietyPeter DebrugeSep 11, 2015
An enthralling and rigorously realistic outer-space survival story. Read full review
88
Rolling StonePeter TraversOct 2, 2015
This suspenseful survival tale, smartass to its core, slaps a smile on your face that you'll wear all the way home. Read full review
88
USA TodayBrian TruittOct 2, 2015
The supporting cast is an embarrassment of riches for Scott, and Chastain is particularly strong as the concerned commander of the mission. Yet this is most definitely Damon’s movie and a throwback to the unabashed idealism of Hollywood past. Read full review
88
Chicago TribuneMichael PhillipsOct 2, 2015
It's one of the most comforting science fiction films in years. Read full review
88
New York PostLou LumenickOct 2, 2015
The Martian is a straightforward and thrilling survival-and-rescue adventure, without the metaphysical and emotional trappings of, say, “Interstellar.’’ It’s pure fun. Read full review
88
Boston GlobeTy BurrOct 2, 2015
The Martian really, truly works — not as art, necessarily, but as the sort of epic, intelligent entertainment the mainstream film industry has supposedly forgotten how to craft. All that, and the movie’s a valentine to creative collaboration as well as an example of it. It’s enough to make you almost grateful. Read full review
88
Philadelphia InquirerSteven ReaOct 2, 2015
The Martian is never less than engaging, and often much more than that. Read full review
88
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Barry HertzOct 2, 2015
The Martian is nearly all things to all audiences: a ticking-clock drama, an intimate character study, a sci-fi comedy, a rollicking space adventure. It’s almost impossible to dislike, which is perhaps its only flaw. When a huge film reveals its eager-to-please intentions from the get-go, the stakes evaporate awfully quick. Read full review
88
ReelViewsJames BerardinelliOct 2, 2015
This is science fiction for sophisticated audiences and, as such, a fulfilling and satisfying experience. Read full review
88
Washington PostAnn HornadayOct 1, 2015
What’s being marketed as a sober, straightforward sci-fi drama (the words “Bring him home” superimposed on an unsmiling Matt Damon inside a space helmet) is instead a smart, exhilarating, often disarmingly funny return to classic adventures of yore. Read full review
88
RogerEbert.comMatt Zoller SeitzOct 1, 2015
The most fascinating thing about the film is how it leans into predictability rather than make a show of fighting it. Read full review
88
Chicago Sun-TimesRichard RoeperSep 30, 2015
Damon is terrific. The movie lives and breathes on his performance, and he comes through in every scene. Read full review
83
The A.V. ClubMike D'AngeloSep 30, 2015
At its heart, The Martian is an unapologetically stirring celebration of our ability, as a species, to solve even the most daunting problems via rational thought, step by step by step. It’s basically "Human Ingenuity: The Movie." Read full review
80
The New YorkerAnthony LaneOct 5, 2015
Damon has never seemed more at home than he does here, millions of miles adrift. Read full review
80
Arizona RepublicBill GoodykoontzOct 1, 2015
[An] enormously entertaining movie. Read full review
80
The New York TimesManohla DargisOct 1, 2015
Mr. Damon’s Everyman quality (he’s our Jimmy Stewart) helps scale the story down, but what makes this epic personal is Mr. Scott’s filmmaking, in which every soaring aerial shot of the red planet is answered by the intimate landscape of a face. Read full review
80
SlateDana StevensOct 1, 2015
The animating humanism of Scott’s film is irreducible. It’s a wry tribute to the qualities that got our species into space in the first place: our resourcefulness, our curiosity and our outsized, ridiculous, beautiful brains. Read full review
80
Time OutJoshua RothkopfSep 22, 2015
Bringing optimism, nerd-itude and a touch of crazy to his character's solo ordeal—at one point, scraggly Watney calls himself a “space pirate”—Damon is the key to the movie’s exuberance. Read full review
80
EmpireIan FreerSep 12, 2015
Anchored by another great turn from Matt Damon, The Martian mixes smarts, laughs, weird character bits and tension on a huge canvas. The result is Scott’s most purely enjoyable film for ages. Read full review
80
Total FilmJamie GrahamSep 12, 2015
It’s not iconic sci-fi to match Alien or Blade Runner but it is a topical, supremely crafted, intelligent, heartfelt spectacle with gallows humour to die for. Strap yourself in. Read full review
80
The Hollywood ReporterTodd McCarthySep 11, 2015
The director and screenwriter downplay the conventional melodrama inherent in the situation in favor of emphasizing how practical problems should be addressed with rational responses rather than hysteria, knee-jerk patriotism or selfish expedience. Read full review
78
Austin ChronicleSteve DavisSep 30, 2015
While there are a few loose ends in Drew Goddard’s screenplay, which is faithful to but necessarily less detailed than its source, the film is a triumph of storytelling, a tribute to the power of the crowd-pleaser. Read full review
75
Christian Science MonitorPeter RainerOct 2, 2015
Entertaining as the movie often is, this all-American, can-do attitude is also the source of its shortcomings. Given the enormousness of its subject, there is a radical lack of awe in this movie. Read full review
75
Portland OregonianJeff BakerOct 2, 2015
What makes The Martian work is Damon. Read full review
75
St. Louis Post-DispatchGail PenningtonOct 2, 2015
A gorgeous film that could inspire a whole new crop of astronauts. Read full review
75
Miami HeraldRene RodriguezOct 1, 2015
Yes, The Martian does look like it was shot on Mars, even though the film’s tone is suspiciously light and cheerful for Scott, who tends to thrive on a chillier, more dour habitat. Read full review
75
ObserverRex ReedSep 30, 2015
A lot of the information in The Martian will be incomprehensible to the lay audience and the climax is…well, not exactly original. But it makes for one hell of an entertaining ride. Read full review
75
Charlotte ObserverLawrence ToppmanSep 29, 2015
The Martian celebrates both the indomitable human spirit and the belief that our species can, with patience and common sense, think its way out of almost any problem. If the film occasionally preaches, its message strikes home. Read full review
75
Movie NationRoger MooreSep 29, 2015
The coolest sequences in the film are its first third, with Watney’s communication cut off and NASA unaware he’s there. Read full review
75
IndieWireEric KohnSep 11, 2015
As commercial entertainment, The Martian delivers on expectations of a "smart" blockbuster even as it adheres to the formula of a relatively simple feel-good drama. Though "Interstellar" aimed for more ambition, The Martian plays it safer: It's a brainy studio effort that sticks to familiar ground in more ways than one. Read full review
75
The PlaylistKevin JagernauthSep 11, 2015
The Martian is the most purely enjoyable picture Scott has made in years. The streamlined narrative and the film’s consistent pacing, aided by a cast who don’t make a wrongfooted move, makes for easy popcorn entertainment. Read full review
70
Screen DailyJohn HazeltonSep 11, 2015
Visually spectacular and consistently entertaining, Ridley Scott’s space rescue procedural The Martian suffers only from a failure to hit its emotional beats with the amount of force and feeling usually required to make this kind of life-and-death adventure really take off. Read full review
60
Village VoiceStephanie ZacharekSep 25, 2015
The Martian is only partly a story about a man in peril; it's mostly a story about men (and a few women) taking control of the uncontrollable. It's confident, swaggering sci-fi, not the despairing kind. That may be why, as elaborate and expensive-looking as The Martian is, it's almost totally lacking in poetry. Read full review
60
CineVueBen NicholsonSep 12, 2015
The Martian is ultimately a love letter to the spirit that saw humanity reach for the stars in the first place. When it's channelling that spirit via Damon and witty writing it lifts off, but then can't quite sustain its trajectory in orbit. Read full review
60
The TelegraphTim RobeySep 11, 2015
It’s a film about micromanaging, fixing things on the fly, and a lot of Ridley’s gruff, technocrat personality shines through. Read full review
60
The GuardianHenry BarnesSep 11, 2015
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. Read full review
50
San Francisco ChronicleMick LaSalleOct 1, 2015
The new Ridley Scott movie is fascinating and charming and crammed and overstuffed, and it’s a curious case, too. It gets all the seemingly hard things wonderfully right, but then caves in at points that should have been easy. Read full review
50
Slant MagazineJaime N. ChristleySep 23, 2015
The film goes in for the idea of texture and tics and human behavior, but there's no conviction, and no real push for eccentricity. Read full review
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