Review: The Martian
Posted by Anura Samara, 5 June 2016
A space movie about space that involves thinking and science. No villains, no romance.
Following up our interest in science and space (see The Last Man on the Moon and Cosmos), we’ve now turned to a modern science fiction film.
To be honest, I didn’t approach this movie with high hopes – most modern films about space tend to focus on the special effects to the detriment of plot and dialogue, and I didn’t expect much from Matt Damon either.
At least in The Martian Damon is playing a real NASA astronaut, not some retired astronaut or other everyman who is co-opted into a crazy project to save the planet. The movie starts with a NASA team on the surface of Mars doing some fairly mundane research, just as I hope they will be doing in my lifetime.
A dust storm damages their base and flying debris injures Mark Watney (Damon), and the rest of the crew leave the surface for safety assuming that he is dead. In fact, he survives but then has to face the reality is that he is stranded on a strange planet with only the resources left behind in the damaged base to support him for the years it will take for a rescue mission to arrive. He sets about patching up equipment and then starts on his most critical need – food. He turns the inside of the base station into a potato farm grown from a single left over potato and fertilised ‘organically’.
In time, the NASA people on Earth realise that someone is still alive on Mars and rudimentary attempts are made to establish contact, using the now abandoned Pathfinder probe.
Large chunks of the movie are spent watching Watney’s desperate attempts to sustain himself and wait for rescue. The rest of the movie is split between the returning crew and the people on the ground as they figure out how and when to launch a rescue mission (the crew understandably want to return to pick up their crewmate, the people on the ground want to send an unmanned resupply rocket).
Yes, there’s tension on the way as the planned resupply mission fails and even the final rescue appears doomed to failure at the last minute. But it’s not really nail-biting stuff.
I enjoy this movie a lot. Firstly, it was about success based on thought and science – brawn was never part of the equation – so we get to see a hero thinking his way out of a problem. There was no romance – our hero isn’t inspired by a need to return to his loved ones, just a professional completing his mission. There are no villains really – although we do see clashes as different rescues are proposed and then discarded, but in the end the rescue is a coordinated affair with support from the Chinese space program. And Damon handled the solitary scenes well – too often, I find that American characters resort to inane internal banter when left alone (think Castaway, any Sandra Bullock movie) but in The Martian Damon’s character does this through a video diary he maintains – a very professional approach.
This movie makes me think about one of my first interests, Antarctic exploration. It harks back to those days when men (yes, always men) set about to head off to the unknown in the name of both science and exploration, put themselves beyond the edges of human help and then had to survive regardless of what nature threw at them
Categories: Movies
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