Review

The Martian

Mark Watney (Matt Damon) must use his wits to try to survive after he’s stranded on a hostile planet in Ridley Scott’s The Martian.
Mark Watney (Matt Damon) must use his wits to try to survive after he’s stranded on a hostile planet in Ridley Scott’s The Martian.

Both the wildly popular novel by novice writer Andy Weir and the subsequent big-budget blockbuster helmed by celebrated filmmaker Ridley Scott prove just how difficult it can be to create a riveting drama in which the main protagonist is far more intent on displaying his irreverent wit than exploring the inner workings of his emotional core.

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Mark Watney (Matt Damon) is an astronaut who gets left behind on the Red Planet in Ridley Scott’s film of Andy Weir’s wildly popular novel The Martian.

Weir's novel, The Martian, about an American astronaut accidentally marooned on Mars, which began as a self-published e-book before being snapped up by The Crown Publishing Group and becoming a huge best-seller, is rife with both the good and the bad about Weir's burgeoning aesthetic. On the positive side of the ledger, he manages to incorporate hard science in a way that's not only illustrative, but also quite fascinating. His abandoned astronaut, Mark Watney, left on the red planet by a crew who had to assume him lost and dead during an emergency escape, spends a good deal of his time having to solve basic survival problems -- conjuring up enough food to last him until NASA can send help, fixing essential life-support mechanisms, planning a daring long-distance rendezvous with the next planned Mars mission -- and utilizing logical calculations to help determine his best course of action.

The Martian

75 Cast: Matt Damon, Jessica Chastain, Kristen Wiig, Jeff Daniels, Michael Pena, Sean Bean, Kate Mara, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Mackenzie Davis

Director: Ridley Scott

Rating: PG-13 for some strong language, injury images, and brief nudity

Running time: 141 minutes

The book is crammed with such intriguing ephemera as how to use human compost to help grow potatoes, and how to burn hydrazine into water, as well as long passages of dense mathematical calculations, but even those, in service to his survival, are relatable enough to keep your mind from swimming. Weir has his protagonist employ his ingenuity to solve many of his immediate problems (it certainly helps that he was the crew's official botanist, so growing food is well in his wheelhouse) which helps keep the crude narrative pummeling along. In this particular way, it's a richly satisfying experience.

Where the novel really falters is in its lack of emotional depth and introspection. Pointedly, the novel offers Watney without a family of his own, and only a vague concern for his parents. Like many a teenaged boy of a certain nerdish disposition, Weir wants his protagonist freed of such emotionally complicating factors, so he can instead focus on all the cool science and space stuff he really wants to write about.

To a certain degree, this works, but when the novel eventually has to break off from Watney's first-person journal entries to instead focus on the NASA directors working furiously to try and get him home, Weir's lack of emotional depth becomes alarmingly transparent. This is an issue certainly noted by the film studio's marketing team, perhaps a bit more sensitive to the topic than the filmmakers, who even crafted a purposefully misleading trailer that strongly suggests Watney has a wife and child of his own he desperately misses in an attempt to circumnavigate the thorny issue of the book's lack of emotive intensity.

Unsurprisingly, Watney's forced humor and wisenheimer routine comes straight from Weir himself, who admits in an interview included in the digital version of the novel, "I'm the same level of smart-ass that he is. It was a really easy book to write: I just had him say what I would say." He has Watney endlessly amuse himself by watching episodes of Happy Days and complaining about his captain's choice of stored music (disco), as if he were sloughing off in a dorm room, waiting for his Hot Pocket to come out of the microwave. For better or worse, Scott works to stay true to his source material in this regard, even if it reduces the film's impact to little more than the equivalent of said microwavable fast-food.

Once Watney (Matt Damon) realizes the full reality of his predicament, he realizes how crucial it is that he be able to communicate with NASA back on Earth, even though the communication system in the ground station he's living in is completely wrecked. Back on Earth, NASA's director (Jeff Daniels) and upper management team (including Chiwetel Ejiofor, Kristen Wiig and Sean Bean) wring their hands about their predicament right up until they realize, based on a series of helpful satellite photos, that Watney is still alive.

Fully cognizant of the devastating PR ramifications of letting him die under the world's watchful eye, the team goes all in trying to devise a plan that might lead to his safe return. Meanwhile, the crew of Watney's erstwhile mission, led by Captain Lewis (Jessica Chastain), sullenly returning home after being forced to leave without him, is finally informed of his survival and decides to go against direct orders, returning to Mars in an attempt to save him.

For his part, Scott realizes the nature of the property under his helm. All too aware of the film's flatness, he instead pours his energies into creating a kind of hyped-up survival procedural that proves to be narratively enjoyable, if not emotionally seductive. It also helps the film no end to have Damon playing the lead, creating a sympathetic portrait of a man using humor and irreverence to perhaps stay the demons of terror that we assume must be constantly nipping at his heels, even if they remain hidden by Watney's incessant glib bon mots ("Really looking forward to not dying," Watney writes to a NASA staff member during their first transmission together).

But it's still noteworthy, even by the film's conclusion, after Watney has suffered as the lone living creature on a planet 140 million miles from home for more than 500 days, that at no point does the unprecedented loneliness of his situation ever seem to bother him. Even prisoners in solitary confinement have the psychological benefit of knowing there are fellow humans out there, even if they're just the captors.

Of course, it could also be that Weir is actually on to something here: Maybe incessant bad jokes and self-aware irreverence can preserve the human spirit better than the holiest books and most soul-stirring art. The film closes with Gloria Gaynor's disco classic I Will Survive. It's meant to be one last ironic joke, but perhaps we're selling it short. It could be Watney's raison d'etre.

MovieStyle on 10/02/2015

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