The anticipation is building for Ridley Scott’s upcoming “Alien: Covenant,” as we await the director getting back in the saddle of demanding, large-scale sci-fi moviemaking again, especially after he regained his footing following the lugubrious “Exodus: Gods and Kings” with 2015’s hugely entertaining “The Martian.” That film was a crackerjack space nerd’s fantasy that championed science and pragmatism above attention-getting set pieces (though it admittedly had a few of those, and they all worked). The film was also an ideal showcase for its star Matt Damon, who excels perhaps more than any other American leading man at playing a decent guy dropped, without warning, into a perilous and potentially life-threatening situation.
Like many of Scott’s best pictures, the technical bonafides of “The Martian” are practically peerless. Lensed by Scott’s cinematographer Dariusz Wolski, the film looks terrific, painting Mars in shades of burnt-out, almost brown crimson. And yet, another area in which Scott’s film accurately conveys the isolation and loneliness experienced by the movie’s protagonist, astronaut Mark Watney, is through sound and sound editing. Indeed, “The Martian” was nominated for Best Sound Editing at this year’s Academy Awards ceremony (it lost out, somewhat understandably, to “Mad Max: Fury Road”) and it’s now the subject of a supercut from Zackery Ramos-Taylor titled “Hearing the Martian.” Granted, the cut itself is mostly a series of whooshing doors opening and buttons being pushed, but it’s still a neat distillation of Scott’s vision, and one that captures the desolate loneliness of Watney’s plight in the film.