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Matt Damon takes on the Red Planet in first official trailer for The Martian


Months after the premier of the teaser for The Martian, 20th Century Fox has released a full (very similar), official trailer.

Embedded above, the spot is almost three minutes long and reveals quite a bit of the film’s plot. Here’s a snippet of the official synopsis, most of which you can glean from the video.

“During a manned mission to Mars, Astronaut Mark Watney (Matt Damon) is presumed dead after a fierce storm and left behind by his crew. But Watney has survived and finds himself stranded and alone on the hostile planet. With only meager supplies, he must draw upon his ingenuity, wit and spirit to subsist and find a way to signal to Earth that he is alive …”

As Jimi Hendrix’s All Along the Watchtower blares in the background, the trailer gives us a taste of Matt Damon’s plight. The drama is baked right in, but so is something else: comedy.

All too often, these sorts of survival epics are fraught with melodrama — but this film seems to have left plenty of room for levity.

“In your face, Neil Armstrong,” cries Damon at one point in the trailer and — upon recognizing the challenges of growing food and producing drinking water — the celestial castaway admits that he’s going to have to “science the shit out of this.”

With sci-fi god Ridley Scott at the helm, expectations are high for this one, but what we’ve seen so far is pretty encouraging.

We’ll just have to hope that Damon doesn’t go all Interstellar on his rescuers if they ever make it to the Red Planet. The last time the actor was stranded alone on a hostile world, he was kind of an ass.

Relax, Matt “help is only 140 million miles away.”

The Martian also stars Jessica Chastain (Interstellar, Zero Dark Thirty), Kristen Wiig (Welcome to Me, The Skeleton Twins), Kate Mara (House of Cards), Michael Pena (Fury, End of Watch), Jeff Daniels (The Newsroom, Dumb and Dumber To), Chiwetel Ejiofor (12 Years a Slave, Children of Men), and Donald Glover (Community, Mystery Team). The film is adapted from an Andy Weir novel of the same name, and is set to hit theaters on Oct. 2, 2015.

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Adam Poltrack
Adam is an A/V News Writer for Digital Trends, and is responsible for bringing you the latest advances in A/V…
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