by Haley Mitchell, online & photography editor

“It’s been seven days since I ran out of ketchup.”

Already being hailed as “the best thriller of the year”, Ridley Scott’s The Martian opened last night and already accounts for 54% of this weekend’s ticket sales. Packed with intensity, heartbreak and suspense, The Martian is sure to rock both your socks and the box office.

Matt Damon is Mark Watney, a botanist who finds himself stranded on Mars after his five other very famous crew mates presume him dead and leave Watney behind on the red planet. Facing very realistic problems such as medical care, starvation and regaining communication with Earth, Mark has to life hack everything NASA prepared for the mission to last him long enough to be rescued or die trying.

While the cast is undoubtedly star studded, from Childish Gambino to Kirsten Wiig (aka that lady from Bridesmaids), many big names seem to play second fiddle to Damon. Their minor roles would usually have been cast to lesser known actors, so by featuring such big names in the industry Damon’s talents are almost overshadowed by his fellows. Almost.

The film features a variety of camera techniques, most prominently the video-diary Watney uses to log his daily activities. This provides an entertaining insight into the thought process of the martian and closely follows the action described in The Martian‘s novel counterpart of the same name. Time lapses were also frequently used to show as much activity as possible while increasing the sense of isolation that resonates throughout the film, and while I do love a good time lapse, whenever the action was left in real time I was anxious to get on with the rest of the movie. Despite minuscule pacing issues, the story was never hard to follow, as it sometimes could be in the book that the movie was based off of.

It’s evident that the movie makers tried to get the science and math as accurate as possible, hiring NASA consultants and using the travel dates written in the book, which were calculated by author Andy Weir’s own computer program. But even though there’s a healthy dose of data throughout, the film in its entirety was riveting. Watney’s solitude is a constant factor through his whole ordeal, established in his video logs but also in the almost etheral shots of Watney wandering around Mars’ uninhabited surface completely and utterly alone.

Overall The Martian was beautiful.

In every cinematic, writing, and theatrical sense it was beautiful.

The only thing the book couldn’t have prepared me for was bearded Matt Damon. And the disco. There was so much disco.