Someone’s Worked Out The Cost Of Saving Matt Damon All The Times He’s Goofed In Films

Spoilers to some somewhat predictable Matt Damon films.

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In an effort to give this some much-needed context, here’s an abridged version of Matt Damon’s incredibly diverse filmography to date:

Courage Under Fire (1997): Damon plays a distressed (and severely malnourished) US Army medic whose life was saved in action by Meg Ryan.

Saving Private Ryan (1998): Damon plays a US army soldier who goes missing during the Allied invasion of Normandy in World War II. An elaborate search operation is launched in which two men die to find him.

Interstellar (2014): Damon has been trapped on an otherwise uninhabited planet fooling the desperate people of Earth into thinking he has the key to humanity’s salvation. When a manned ship comes to save him and make a last ditch effort in ensuring the children of Earth won’t die of noxious gas inhalation, he tries to murder an astronaut then disobeys a direct order killing himself and endangering everyone else on board.

The Martian (2015): Damon gets hit by a piece of space shrapnel about three minutes into the film and is stranded alone on Mars as a result. Over the following 139 minutes he proceeds to make everything about him, re-directs all of NASA’s presumably important resources into saving his life and encourages his crewmates (some of whom are parents to young children) to casually add four years onto their journey to pick him up.

He is the worst possible version of that friend you have who insistently asks for lifts even though they live in the opposite direction of where you’re going.

In acknowledgement of all this, an Australian scientific researcher Kynan Eng has recently set out to quantify the cost of Matt Damon’s characters’ enduring ineptitude. A few months ago he answered the question “How much money has been spent attempting to bring Matt Damon back from distant places?” on Quora and his response has gone viral overnight:

Fictional costs (my estimates, costs are in 2015 currency)

Courage Under Fire (Gulf War 1 helicopter rescue): $300k

Saving Private Ryan (WW2 Europe search party): $100k

Titan AE (Earth evacuation spaceship): $200B

Syriana (Middle East private security return flight): $50k

Green Zone (US Army transport from Middle East): $50k

Elysium (Space station security deployment and damages): $100m

Interstellar (Interstellar spaceship): $500B

The Martian (Mars mission): $200B

TOTAL: $900B plus change

When speaking to BuzzFeed about his method in getting these numbers, Eng was pretty straight-forward. “I just made them up,” he said. “This is not real research in the sense that I know it. It would be nice to get this type of coverage for my real work.”

What the… someone tells me this is the #2 trending topic on Facebook right now. Matt Damon please buy me a beer… https://t.co/BOnfPyg1D4

— Kynan Eng (@kynan_eng) December 27, 2015

And, while that’s all a fairly devastating indictment of the state of modern media and the general population’s interest in actual science, it’s a big win for people’s enduring fascination with Matt Damon.

This is a guy who made one great movie, became an action star who didn’t know his own name, and — despite the fact he is an Academy Award-winning writer and has earned multiple nominations for his acting — is still recovering from the fact two cartoonists gave him a funny voice 11 years ago.

God bless you, Matt Damon. I’d save you from any planet you get adorably stranded on (though maybe not a third time).