Okay, maybe you've heard this one before, but here goes: The Martian is just the movie America needs right now. A marvelously constructed, flawlessly paced drama about a NASA mission to Mars that goes disastrously awry, the film's animating spirit is a mix of can-do-ism and stick-to-itiveness that carries familiar echoes from sunnier times in our national narrative—albeit leavened with a fashionable frisson of mutinous, antibureaucratic irreverence.

When the explorers are engulfed in a dust storm and must evacuate from Mars, one astronaut becomes separated from the rest as they make their way to the launch module. The group's commander (Jessica Chastain, looking magnificently haunted) opts to save her crew (played by Michael Peña, Kate Mara, and Sebastian Stan) and blast off instead of trying to retrieve their presumably dead compatriot amid the hellish hail of gravel that threatens to topple their escape vehicle on the launchpad. But astronaut Mark Watney is of course alive and kicking. As he picks himself up off the Martian ground and takes stock of what's been left behind at the mission base on which he might maintain himself in that condition, he quickly realizes he faces daunting odds at an outpost whose travel time from Earth is measured not in days but in months.

Perfectly cast as Watney is Matt Damon, who exudes a sharp and knowing but unflashy authenticity similar to that of Tom Hanks, but who also authoritatively embodies the man of action à la Jason Bourne. Both qualities serve Damon admirably here, as Watney is called both to draw upon his dogged psychic resources to stay alive in situ and to calculate which arduous risks he must take to escape his dire predicament. Doing so requires a whole string of work-arounds and some arduous travel around a masterfully depicted martian landscape. (It should ruin no one's admiration or appreciation of this bravura filmmaking to learn that these sequences were filmed in a surreally sere desert in the south of Jordan.)

As NASA and the world become aware that Watney is making his stand on Mars even as his mission mates hurtle back toward Earth, The Martian broadens away from the kind of solitary struggle depicted by Hanks in Castaway and Robert Redford in All Is Lost. Even similarities to Apollo 13 and Gravity are shed as an international cast of characters apply themselves to the long-odds cause of trying to save Watney. Jeff Daniels good-naturedly plays the risk-averse, expectations-lowering bureaucrat who heads NASA; Kristen Wiig serves as his bemused PR sidekick; Chiwetel Ejiofor makes for a spirited and rebellious Mars program chief; and Donald Glover fairly steals the show at mission control as the iconoclastic young geek who hatches a brilliant plan B.

The Martian marks a wonderful return to grand filmmaking for the prodigious producer and director Ridley Scott after his humorless and joyless recent outings with The Counselor and Exodus: Gods and Kings; it's an achievement fully worthy of the man who has brought us everything from Alien and Blade Runner to Thelma and Louise. And, finally and fittingly, this screen adaptation marks a special triumph for The Martian's creator, Andy Weir, who sold the novel himself on Amazon for 99 cents a pop until its success persuaded Crown to publish it, to universal sci-fi acclaim. How perfectly Martian.

This article originally appears in the October 2015 issue of ELLE.