For the sake of clarification and brevity, it’s important to get one thing out of the way: The Martian is the best Mars movie anyone’s ever made, and its soundtrack is the best Mars music that’s even been made.
The movie’s score (and this is an important distinction, as there are both score and “songtrack” albums from The Martian out there) is a triumph of tone. Harry Gregson-Williams knows when to deploy his full orchestral resources and when to pare things back to a sparer sound fitting Mark Watney’s plight. But here’s where The Martian differs from, say, the overriding bleakness of the later TV miniseries Mars: Gregson-Williams brings percolating synths into play, practically providing a soundtrack for the synapses firing in Watney’s head as he vows to “science the shit out of this” and then proceeds to do precisely that. At times playful, at times dense and technical-sounding, these sequences are the sound of hope and resourcefulness in a movie that many are praising for – somewhat unusually for Hollywood – getting a great deal of the science right.
That’s the difference, both musically and thematically, between The Martian and Mars.
The dramatic stakes are upper orchestrally where appropriate, whether it’s the Ares IV’s initial desperate blastoff to the safety of Mars orbit, or the crew’s even more desperate attempts to recover their crewmate against staggering odds. Where the synth sequences are lighter and energetic, these scenes are heavy on percussion and rumbling bass lines, because Serious Stuff is happening.
It’s easy to forget that there was a great score for this movie when it seems like the studio was so eager to fashion a tie-in album of existing ’70s songs from the movie’s plot device of Commander Lewis’ behind-the-times playlist, but the music for the travelogue of Watney abandoning the safety of his habitat and 
setting out on a perilous trek to an already-landed ascent vehicle alone is worth the price of admission here. In terms of both music and movie, it’s scenes like that which keep The Martian as my favorite movie of a year that brought back the Star Wars franchise amid considerable hype. Heat up some potatoes and give this a listen.
- Mars (2:25)
- Emergency Launch (3:09)
- Making Water (2:38)
- Spotting Movement (1:49)
- Science the S*** Out of This (2:16)
- Messages from Hermes (3:31)
- Sprouting Potatoes (1:39)
- Watney’s Alive! (2:46)
- Pathfinder (2:33)
- Hexadecimals (2:33)
- Crossing Mars (3:36)
- Reap & Sow (2:21)
- Crops Are Dead (3:26)
- Work the Problem (1:58)
- See You In a Few (5:11)
- Build a Bomb (5:06)
- I Got Him! (4:45)
Released by: Columbia Records
Release date: September 30, 2015
Total running time: 51:42
