Format: DVD from NetFlix on rockin’ flatscreen.
It’s kind of a running Hollywood joke that Matt Damon gets left places and has to be rescued. That’s the central plot device of The Martian: Matt Damon gets stranded on Mars and needs to be rescued. That might be the basic plot here, but the truth is that The Martian is less about rescuing Matt Damon and more about how balls-out cool space is. If you aren’t awed by space, amazed by it, or humbled by it, you haven’t really looked at it.
So at an unspecified time in the near future, The Martian proposes that we have sent a manned mission to Mars. A crew of six is on the surface of the planet doing Mars-y, space-y stuff when a massive windstorm crops up and threatens their small base. In fact, the storm is so significant that it forces an abort of the mission. The crew scurries to their craft to escape when a piece of blowing debris impales the crew’s botanist Mark Watney (Matt Damon), puncturing his suit and is biomonitor, which makes everyone think he is dead. The ship blasts off with a crew of five, leaving Mark on the planet wounded, but still alive.
What follows is, as Mark Watney says at one point, him “sciencing the shit” out of Mars in order to survive. He knows that it will be years until a rescue mission can be mounted to come pull him back from the planet, and even with the rations for six people, he doesn’t have nearly enough food to survive. As the botanist, he figures out how to use the potatoes in the rations and the vacuum-sealed waste packets to grow potatoes, which solves one of his basic problems. A bigger issue is the necessity for him to travel several thousand kilometers to where the next mission will land and how to keep himself alive during the trip.
It is a science bonanza. Mark heads first to the landing site of the Pathfinder probe connects it back up, using it to communicate with NASA. With the best minds in the world working on the problem, what we get is a fiction, hyper-intensified version of Apollo 13, where new problems crop up constantly and are solved through careful thought and bad-ass science. Rescue missions and resupply missions are planned and go south, until the Chinese space agency reveals that they have a rocket that can be used.
Two plans are developed. The first is to use the Chinese rocket to go to Mars and resupply Mark until the next Mars mission. The second is to resupply the returning spacecraft with the five astronauts and have them slingshot around the Earth, return to Mars, and pick up Mark on a fly-by. As that is the more dramatic and tense option, that’s the one we’ll be going with.
The Martian features a good ensemble cast, including performances from Jessica Chastain as the flight commander; Jeff Daniels, Kristen Wiig, Sean Bean, Benedict Wong, Mackenzie Davis, Donald Glover, and Chiwetel Ejiofor back in Mission Control; Shu Chen and Eddy Ko from the Chinese space agency; and Sebastian Stan, Kate Mara, Michael Pena, and Aksel Hennie aboard the ship. This is the sort of film that needs this kind of massive cast, and it’s one of the things I like the most about The Martian. While we’re supposed to be inspired by the heroic efforts of Mark Watney to survive on a hostile planet by himself, it is very much a team effort and science at its best to bring him back home. (It's worth noting that Benedict Wong seems to be known for space movies. His IMDB page shows him known for this, Moon, Prometheus, and Sunshine.)
What I like most here, though, is that science is the real star of the picture. I (and many of my readers) live in a country where a substantial portion of the population thinks that science isn’t true, that the planet is about 6,000 years old and that, to quote Inherit the Wind, we were planted here like a geranium. Movies like The Martian are critical for getting people excited about science and for inspiring another generation of people to think that space exploration is important and worth doing. We need more movies that paint science in a positive light and show it for what it can be and that show the people who work in science can be heroes as well.
It’s easy to take this in the other direction—without science, Mark Watney wouldn’t have been in danger in the first place. But it is the science that saves him. The people are the heroes here, but so are physics and botany and chemistry. It’s easy to overlook that, and it shouldn’t be overlooked.
The Martian is a compelling story, of course. There are obvious parallels to films like Apollo 13 and Gravity and Cast Away, as well as classic stories like Robinson Crusoe. One person isolated and surviving against all odds is always compelling, which is why so many stories and movies (Life of Pi, All is Lost, etc.) are based around this basic theme.
I enjoyed this quite a bit. It’s perhaps a bit long, running just over 2:20. Trimmed down a little, I think it tells the same story a little more efficiently. But that’s a quibble for something that just might inspire people to take more science and math classes.
Why to watch The Martian: Science is bad-ass and space science is especially bad-ass.
Why not to watch: Matt Damon keeps getting needing to be rescued.
Did you read the book? The book was definitely better, especially for science nerds because it's loaded with technical language that's been watered down a bit for popular consumption. The book also features some disasters that the movie didn't have time to depict without turning the story into a ponderous three-hour epic. For what it's worth, my review of the book is here, and my review of the movie is here.
ReplyDeleteScience nerd that you are, what the hell took you so long so see this film? I do hope you have a huge TV: it's definitely meant to be a big-screen experience.
My above comment may have left you with the impression that I didn't like the movie. In truth, I liked the movie a lot. It didn't grip me as hard as "Apollo 13" did, but it was still a fine, fine film.
ReplyDeleteI don't go to the theater that often (exactly four times last year), which explains why I didn't see it in theaters. No other excuse for waiting until now save that about half of what I get from NetFlix is random chance (I front-load all of the films with a wait status) and I had a few other priorities over the last month or so.
DeleteI also haven't read the book. Almost all of my pleasure reading these days is non-fiction, and almost all of that is done as audiobook, since reading is my job, essentially. It's one I'll consider, though, since there almost certainly has to be an audio format available.
My TV is, I think, 52". It might be 48".
And I agree on Apollo 13, which I think is (along with The Right Stuff), the greatest science recruitment tool available.
I listened to the audiobook version simultanous to watching the movie, which means I heard half the book before, the rest after the theater. Since the book is absolutely a gem (it may be the fastest book to get through for me ever) the film falls a bit short because of the shortcuts it makes. My wife was complaining that things just happen without sufficient explanation, but all the explanation is there, in the book. 2 hours 20 minutes is not too short, in fact to do justice to the story this is the bare minimum.
ReplyDeleteAs a scientist I can only applaud Hollywood for doing this type of movies. There are far too few of them made.
Anecdote: We had a MarsLab at university when I was a student where we studied martian soil and winds. One of my collegues went to JPL to watch the landing of the probes in, I think, 99 or 2000. They never landed due to bad science. Somebody had mixed up the elevation units (feet and meters).
Anecdote two: Martian air density would never allow sand and gravel to fly through the air. It is necessary for the story, but grates in a movie where science is so prominent.
See, this is a lot of the science stuff that I don't actually know. I'm a science dilettante in that I'm interested in it and read a lot about it, but my discipline is language. A lot of the basic ideas are ones I just don't know.
DeleteThat said, I agree--we need more science-positive movies in the world. Science is too often seen as a villain or a cause of evil in film.
I was wondering about Martian air density myself when watching the movie. I thought it unlikely that that type and magnitude a storm could actually occur. Thanks.
DeleteI saw this at the movies, and really enjoyed it. I agree about the positive picture it paints of science. Not coming from a science background, I appreciated the 'dumbed down' versions of things: I understood this a tad more than I did Interstellar.
ReplyDeleteFrom a dramatic point of view, the lightness of touch was an interesting approach to take. Scott and the writers could have easily have had Watney go through several existential crises, but the pace and sountrack maintained the levity.
I guffawed at the presence of Sean Bean in the discussion of the 'Council of Elrond' scene!
I liked the tone. It would have been easy to make this doom-and-gloom, and there are moments of it. Those moments are necessary, I think, but the movie works because Mark Watney operates under the idea that he's probably going to die but he doesn't want to.
DeleteThe soundtrack works in a large part because they don't go cliche with it. It would be easy, for instance, to have Rocket Man playing when he blasts off Mars, and I'm glad they didn't go there.
I guffawed at the presence of Sean Bean in the discussion of the 'Council of Elrond' scene!
DeleteThis. Big time.
It is a pretty awesome little moment of meta.
DeleteI liked this but as a few others mentioned it wasn't as compelling as Apollo 13. I'm fascinated by space but I'm no scientist so I liked that the filmmakers didn't bury what was going on in too much complex detail while still making it clear that a great deal of knowledge was required for their mission to be successful.
ReplyDeleteIt could have been a bit more lean but its greatest strength was Matt Damon in the lead. It's a Move Star performance and since his portion of the film is a one man show that is what's needed. Without someone of his magnetism in that spot you wouldn't be as invested in the outcome. That's a key element that many film makers nowadays seem to have forgotten.
Oh, I agree with you. Apollo 13 is my favorite space movie, followed closely by The Right Stuff.
DeleteI think there's just enough science here to make things understandable for a lay audience. It's handled well. It makes science exciting and interesting without making it confusing, and that's really what needed to be done.
There are probably a few actors who could do a role like this and make it work, but Damon is one of those actors who is immediately likeable on screen. We're invested in no small part because we like Matt Damon.
Loved, loved, loved the book, but found the movie to be miscast as Damon was recently the villain in another astronaut film, Interstellar. I just couldn't get Interstellar's villain out of my head the entire film.
ReplyDeleteHaven't seen Interstellar, so I didn't have that problem. I think Damon is essentially likeable, which makes him good for a role like this. It also makes him an effective potential villain.
Delete"Mars will come to fear my botany powers."
ReplyDeleteI liked The Martian a lot the first time I saw it, and even more the second time. Here is my review of it:
http://www.tipsfromchip.blogspot.com/2016/01/movies-martian-2015.html
About a month after seeing it the second time I finally broke down and spent ten bucks for the paperback book (I knew it had started out life as a free story on a blog so it galled me a little bit to pay that much for it.) I liked the book, too, but it comes across as an almost unrelenting list of problems. That's a result of the way the author wrote it - each blog post was the problem then the solution. And at first in the book it's only Watney - to the point that I wondered if the whole book was that way, so when they finally got to other characters on Earth and in the spaceship it was a relief. While the movie left out some problems (mostly on the trip to the other launch vehicle - dust storm blocking solar panels, rover overturning) I don't think the story suffers for it. I think the movie did a great job of adapting the book to what it was - a movie. I'd have given the Adapted Screenplay Oscar to The Martian.
I as a little surprised it didn't win for Adapted Screenplay, and while I think the convential wisdom on Dicaprio winning for Best Actor was obviously correct, I thought Damon had an outside chance of the win. I'd love to see the ballots--my guess is that he came in second.
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