‘The Martian’ Trailer: Matt Damon Gets Cast Away on Mars

People have been describing The Martian, the upcoming film from from Ridley Scott, as “the next Gravity.” It’s another lost-in-space adventure story with a small cast and huge life-or-death stakes. But the first trailer for the movie makes it look more like Cast Away, the Robert Zemeckis movie about Tom Hanks stranded on a deserted island, learning to survive with limited tools and the contents of a bunch of FedEx packages. In The Martian, Matt Damon is a member of a NASA mission to Mars that goes wrong; in the midst of a terrible storm the trip to the Red Planet is cut short and Damon’s astronaut is accidentally left behind. While he fights to survive, his crew tries to attempt a rescue mission.

The Martian is based on the novel by Andy Weir and marks the second recent sci-fi film from Alien director Ridley Scott (after the Alien prequel, Prometheus). And it looks really great; a rare sci-fi movie that is more about science (Damon literally says “I’m going to have to science the s--- out of this” when describing the long odds against his survival) than explosions or giant transforming robots. Beyond Damon there’s a great cast too (another thing that marks it as different from Gravity, which was basically a two-person film): Jessica Chastain, Kristen Wiig, Jeff Daniels, Michael Peña, Kate Mara, Sean Bean, The Winter Soldier’s Sebastian Stan, and Chiwetel Ejiofor. Here’s the poster for the film:

It’s Les Mis in space! The Martian opens in November 2015.