During a manned mission to Mars, a violent storm forces the crew to evacuate, and astronaut and botanist Mark Watney, presumed dead, is left stranded on the red planet. Alone, with limited supplies and no way to communicate, Watney draws on his scientific ingenuity to grow food, ration resources and find a way to let Earth know he is still alive. While NASA improvises an impossible rescue and his crewmates face a moral dilemma, survival becomes a problem to be solved with calculation and humor. Ridley Scott adapts Andy Weir's novel into a luminous, optimistic tale about human intelligence in the face of adversity.