Indeed, The Martian is likely the nerdiest space movie you’ll ever see, and it’s a small wonder that the copious amounts of expository science never becomes overwhelming. Watney’s reasoning and methodology with each new challenge is given time to breathe. Back on earth our top minds, including head of NASA Teddy Sanders (Jeff Daniels) and director of the Mars missions Vincent Kapoor (Chiwetel Ejiofor) struggle to come up with any sort of feasible contingency plan. Audiences get to see Watney use a few incredible intellect to keep himself alive on the desolate planet, whether it be using his and his crew member’s bagged-up excrement for fertilizer or digging up a large canister of plutonium to keep himself warm in his rover.
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Thanks to Commander Lewis’ (Jessica Chastain) extensive music library, Watney solves problem after problem to the likes of Donna Summers’ Hot Stuff and David Bowie’s Starman. Well, the dust storm shown in the movie and the trailer which strands Watney on the planet couldn’t have occurred in real life because the air on mars is too thin. Or – as he so colorfully puts it – “Science the… out of this”.
It’s in this moment that Mark Watney, played by Matt Damon, is hit with a satellite due to gusting winds and is left for dead after a failed search to find him.
Think of it as “Gravity“, but farther out and with a wider cast. It borders on the “heartless administrator” trope, even though the arguments he makes are quite valid and he’s just as compelled to get Watney home as everyone else is. Having mass crowds emphatically wave American flags over a rescue attempt feels like overkill.
For the intellectuals out there, this is also a good tale of realistic science fiction and applied technology. “And then the river is no longer a river and the mountain is no longer a mountain, and then later the river is a river again and the mountain is a mountain again”.
“Tremendous critical support with awesome audience reaction conspires for ultimate success”, said Aronson. Unlike many of his movies, this film stands alone from his usual body of work in a good way.
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Though the movie differed from the book in parts, the underlying themes carry throughout. I passed up “Gravity” for that very reason and when my husband told me he had almost had a panic attack while watching that film I knew I had made the right decision. By the end of the movie I could only weep for the current state of our space program knowing such a stunning landscape languishes mostly unexplored and we don’t have any big handsome spacecraft like the one in the movie to get us there.
