The Martian

This is the third year in a row we’ve seen a big-budget, A-list talent, awards-season movie about how outer space is trying to kill us. Two years ago, there was Alfonso Cuaron’s harrowing survival tale Gravity. Last year, Christopher Nolan released his metaphysical mind scrambler, Interstellar. And now we have Ridley Scott directing Matt Damon in The Martian, the story of Mark Watney, a botanist slash astronaut who is mistakenly left behind after a manned mission to Mars is suddenly aborted. Like the other two films in this unofficial space survival trilogy, the movie focuses on one lone individual trying to understand and survive forces much, much bigger than he is and having varying degrees of success.

 After discovering that he’s been left behind, Watney doesn’t spend any time panicking or wallowing in depression. Instead, he gets right to work, assessing his food, water, and air supplies. He tries to find a way to communicate with NASA back on earth to let them know he’s still alive and then works to figure out how to stay that way until someone can rescue him – which, he estimates, ought to be in about four years. 

Watney uses his own natural fertilizer to grow potatoes on Mars, he adapts decaying plutonium to power his Martian dune buggy. He finds the long-lost Pathfinder rover buried under red sand and basically uses it to have an interplanetary Skype session with NASA. Yes, it would seem that astronaut Mark Watney is a cosmic MacGuyver.

While Gravity was an allegory for the human will to survive despite everything and Interstellar was a trippy sci fi tone poem about how love is a physical, measureable force acting in the cosmos, The Martian is all about the science. It occurred to me in the middle of watching the movie that all my engineer friends are going to love this film because it’s basically a big, fat love letter to STEM – science, technology, engineering and math. It’s all about problem solving though physics, chemistry, and mechanical, electrical, and computer engineering.

At one point, it almost became repetitious – Watney faced some seemingly unsolveable problem that would send any normal, non-genius into hysterics, but he thoughtfully gazes out into the Martian landscape for a second and then suddenly says, “I know how to fix it! And he does. In fact, if the narrative has a weakness, it’s that the first half of the film almost makes things seem too easy. Watney’s calm competence combined with Matt Damon’s natural guy-next-door affability makes being stranded alone on a planet 35 million miles away from earth and facing almost certain death seem pretty lightweight. Things get more interesting as things go wrong for Watney here and there, and there’s real tension at the end when he tries to get off the surface of Mars to reconnect with his team that has returned for him. But the movie is ultimately more about the science than the people. 

 Ridley Scott’s direction here is sharp and economical. Scott is one of the streakiest working directors we have. He can make powerful, influential, entertaining films like Alien, Blade Runner, Thelma and Louise, Blackhawk Down, and Gladiator, but he can also make bloated, ponderous bumblers like 1492, The Kingdom of Heaven, and Prometheus. When he focuses on just telling a story instead of trying to make a statement with a capital S, he ususally does his best work. And whatever else you can say about him, nobody knows their way around a sweeping vista like Ridley Scott. His storytelling is hit and miss, but his visuals never fail to be striking, evocative, and lovely.

So maybe outer space is trying to kill us, but I figure as long as I stay on earth, preferably nestled inside a movie theater, I should be safe for a while yet.