“He’s just so versatile and still turning out great stuff, so it was thrilling to work with him”.
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It all goes to prove there’s plenty of intelligent life on Mars. Perhaps Neil Degrasse Tyson will take issue with a few of the practices in The Martian, but to non-rocket scientists, The Martian seems to make ideal sense. Bright, thematically can-do, fast-paced nearly to a fault, and fundamentally optimistic, The Martian is science fiction of the infinitely more comforting Star Trek strain. There’s no melodrama here-only a hard situation and a problem to solve. When someone decodes a secret message in this movie, it isn’t a death order. The Martian, based mostly on Andy Weir’s bestselling novel, has a advantageous, incessantly humorous script by Drew Goddard & a rousing soundtrackAnd there’s another dilemma: ought to Mark’s crewmates imperil their journey home by going back to get him? No wonder NASA loves this movie.
And even though films like Primer are so attractive to me due to their unwillingness to dumb down the science behind their narrative, The Martian never feels like it’s softballing anything at you.
The astronaut is Mark Watney (Matt Damon), a botanist sent along on one of a series of Mars expeditions. Chiwetel Ejiofor plays NASA engineer Vincent Kapoor (he has apparently taken his mum’s name) who is one of the first to realise Watney isn’t dead.
In a spot thousands of barren kilometers away.
And this is the rare movie that it might not be a total waste of time to see in 3D, because some of those long shots of Mars rely on 3D for some of their effect, and some of the space sequences use 3D in a clever way-one which feels very much inspired by the somewhat similar movie Gravity. He’s not done with space yet, as his next film, scheduled for 2017, is another sequel, “Prometheus 2″.
But the characters most short-changed by the overstuffed cast are those of Watney’s crew members, in what is likely the least successful part of the film. It was one of those moments when you’re like, “Maybe if you really want something you just need to say it out loud!”
Can it possibly be it worth it? It’s so bad that they’re ordered to abandon the mission and head back to Earth.
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The entire film follows Watney in his attempt to survive each day with an eye to how he can be rescued in the future. This insoluble moral calculus got more play in Weir’s book. Helpfully keeping a video diary for the advantage of posterity, Mark works out ways of growing potatoes, generating what we will politely call his own organic compost, which may be beyond even Monty Don.In the meantime, back on earth, an eagle-eyed Nasa operative has seen positive signs in that our tuber-reliant hero continues to be alive. “He’s in his 80s and he’s got more energy than anybody and that’s what it was like with Ridley”. Watney’s crew, consisting of Jessica Chastain as Captain Lewis, Michael Pena, Kate Mara, Sebastian Stan and Aksel Hennie, is the third such mission.
