Alien Vs. The Martian

245 Words1 Pages
It is thirty-six years since Scott made “Alien,” and the true companion piece to that great film is not “Prometheus”—the gloomy, beautiful, and oddly superfluous prequel that he directed in 2012—but “The Martian.” Sigourney Weaver and Matt Damon are cut from similar cloth. True, the first is faced by a beast with acid for blood, while the second solemnly reveals that “it has been seven days since I ran out of ketchup,” but both are loners by force of circumstance and copers by instinct. In a recent interview, Scott described “Robinson Crusoe” as “one of my favorite books as a kid” and its hero as “the first astronaut,” and the new film tunes in to that old fixation. So does its leading man. Damon has never seemed more at home than he does here,