When your children range from 8 to 14 years old, it’s hard to find a weekend film for the whole family, particularly with a grandad in the mix as well. Happily, the 2015 film adaptation of Andy Weir’s The Martian, starring Matt Damon (pictured above) as Mark Watney, an astronaut who is accidentally abandoned on Mars, fitted the bill.
There’s something wonderfully enjoyable about watching people being very clever. From Mark’s brilliance growing his potato crop in Mars’s sterile soil to NASA’s ingenious idea for the slingshot manoeuvre to get him home, we lapped it up.
The only low point came when Mark said he was going to have to “science the shit out of this” to stay alive. And not because my 8-year-old heard the s-word (he’s watched The Traitors, after all). My husband (an engineer) felt the right word should have been engineer, not science. Regardless: what a great line it is – and what a joy of a movie.
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