Respond to these rapid questions in our The Martian quiz and we will tell you which The Martian character you are. Play it now.
Ridley Scott’s film “The Martian,” which is about an astronaut trying to survive on a desolate planet, is essentially a shipwreck story at its core; it just so happens to be told in the form of a science fiction adventure. However, although the outline does not contain any unexpected elements, the particulars and the overall tone feel fresh.
This film, starring Matt Damon as Mark Watney, follows a man who, much like Robinson Crusoe and its many offshoots, including “Cast Away” and, of course, “Robinson Crusoe on Mars,” must muster all of his resourcefulness and bravery in order to endure a predicament that appears to be hopeless, and then must contend with the emotional toll of isolation on top of everything else. If you have ever watched a movie, you already know that things are going to turn out fine for Mark. You also know that no production company is going to pay for a special effects driven epic about a smart and likeable castaway who dies in the last five minutes of the movie. You are also aware that despite the Lone Man Against Nature storyline, there is a reason why the filmmakers cast Oscar nominee Jessica Chastain in the role of the captain of the mission that is forced to abort its exploration of the planet’s surface and leave Mark for dead. And no, it wasn’t so that she could turn tail and head for Earth with her crew in the first ten minutes and never return. You also know that, despite the heated discussions back on earth about how dangerous, time consuming, and expensive a rescue mission would be, NASA will still have to stage one, and that any objections (primarily by the character played by Jeff Daniels, who is the agency’s director) will be waved off in the name of doing what’s right. Since it is unquestionable that something will take place, the only question that remains is “how.”
Fortunately, the hows are cleverly envisioned by director Ridley Scott and screenwriter Drew Goddard (who adapted Andy Weir’s source novel, and who also penned “The Cabin in the Woods” and many episodes of ABC’s castaway drama “Lost”). The movie gives careful consideration to fundamental issues such as, “What do you do if the face plate of your helmet cracks?” (What Would You Do If Your Helmet Face Plate Cracked?). “How do you create a food supply on a planet that is unable to support plant life?” “How do you create a food supply?” The expedient responses to those questions are “apply duct tape” and “grow potatoes in a makeshift greenhouse fertilized with the solid waste left behind by the rest of the crew,” respectively. A wisecracking botanist who talks constantly to himself (and by extension the audience) in video diary entries, Mark sees each new crisis as a problem solving exercise, provided that he can get his fear and despair under control long enough to think straight, which he of course does. Mark makes for an affable and centered lead character throughout the entirety of this lengthy but never dull film.
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I’m giving the impression that “The Martian” is a typical science fiction story. It is, but that does not diminish its usefulness in any way. The most interesting aspect of the movie is the way it embraces the fact that it is predictable rather than making a big deal out of trying to avoid it. In the course of doing so, comes up with a tone that, to the best of my knowledge, no one else in this genre has ever conjured, especially not at this level of the budget. “The Martian” is the most laid-back, funny, and possibly the most heartfelt of all the stories you’ve seen about astronauts coping with the aftermath of a catastrophe. This includes “Mission to Mars” and “Gravity,” which is more of a self-help parable with religious overtones. Both of these films are visually superior to “The Martian,” but “Gravity” is more aggressively dramatic. Strangely similar to Scott’s breakthrough horror film “Alien,” which was released in 1979, and possibly even his follow-up film “Blade Runner,” “The Martian” makes the future appear to be both spectacular and mundane at the same time. Even with all of its splendors, the world that the characters are immersed in is nothing more than reality: the time and space in which they happen to be living.
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At times, it appears as if the movie’s greatest artistic inspiration is not any particular previous film or novel, but rather the second act of “2001: A Space Odyssey,” which features endearing images of Dr. Heywood Floyd anxiously reading the instructions on a zero gravity toilet, and sleeping on a Pan Am flight to an orbital space station like a businessman taking the red eye from Los Angeles to New York. The majority of the film’s soundtrack is comprised of disco, which was the only genre of music that Mark could listen to (on the laptop that his captain had left behind). The juxtapositions of sublime examples of disco music from the 1970s, such as “Turn the Beat Around,” “Hot Stuff,” and “Rock the Boat,” with Scott’s panoramic red-brown landscapes and Damon’s grimy, stubble-covered face, are what make Scott’s film. They make Mark’s predicament seem like an exaggerated version of a laborious but necessary task, like tiling a roof or repainting a garage. For example, they make it seem like Mark has to tile a roof or repaint a garage. When you put on some music, even the most laborious tasks seem to go by more quickly.
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The plot of “The Martian” sometimes resembles an unscripted television show about a man who becomes marooned on another planet. The narrative style that Scott and Goddard use has some elements of a “How to” format to it. Mark takes us on a tour of his processes as he talks to himself, demonstrating how, for example, he re-liquefies dried-out waste and mixes it into arid Martian soil. After that, he places halved potatoes in crop furrows and waits for a sprig of green to appear. When Mark is driving several hundred kilometers in a rover to dig up technology left over from another Mars mission, he has to decide whether to turn off the heat in the cockpit to save power during the long journey (he decides against it because even though the heater consumes power, he can’t function if his nether regions are frozen). Cost-benefit analysis is something that comes into play all the time.
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Dr. Vincent Kapoor, played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, is in charge of all of NASA’s Mars mission operations, and he feels an obligation and sense of honor to bring Mark back home. All of the other characters, including Capt. Melissa Lewis, played by Jessica Chastain, Teddy Sanders, played by Jeff Daniels, and Teddy’s morally indignant right hand man, Mitch Henderson, played by Sean Bean, the ideal actor to play a man of conscience, are pretty much on the same page. It is not a question of whether or not everybody wants to do the heroic thing that will please the crowd; the question is whether or not it is possible. It takes a while just to get a radio message to Mars and back, and you can’t just send a spacecraft there like you would send a birthday present through the mail overnight. Both the preparation and the funding for the mission are required. This could take a few months or even a few years. At one point, the individuals working for NASA debate whether or not they should forego performing safety inspections on an unmanned flight in order to meet a certain deadline.
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Even though they are working against the clock, working through equations on wiper boards, and worrying about money, fuel, and safety issues, the NASA technicians, scientists, and managers talk to each other without hysteria for the most part. They make hasty statements for which they later feel the need to apologize. They crack jokes. There are a few exchanges that are almost funny enough to be told at the office. It is easy to forget how skilled Scott is at camaraderie and banter because so much of his reputation is predicated on his capacity to conceive of and carry out elegant images, which are frequently employed in the service of dark narratives (see “Thelma and Louise” and “Matchstick Men,” among others). The film “The Martian” is the only one of his works that successfully combines both of these aspects of his talent. When it’s at its best, it has the calm assurance of a buddy adventure directed by Howard Hawks, in which no situation is ever so dire that it can’t still find room for a little bit of lighthearted humor.
The initial impressions of the characters are somewhat hazy and one-dimensional, but as more and more specific information is revealed, the characters develop more depth. Even minor characters who only appear in one or two scenes can have a significant impact on the plot. One such character is Rich Purnell, played by Donald Glover. He is a brilliant but eccentric young scientist who is so immersed in his own thoughts that he does not even know the name of the NASA director. The scene in which communications expert Mindy Park (Mackenzie Davis) and Kapoor interpret the inflection of Mark’s typed response to a radical plan to rescue him is one of the best in the movie. Mark’s response reads, “Are you f——-g kidding me?” Kapoor harbors the vain hope that Mark was trying to convey his enthusiasm regarding NASA’s audacity, but he is well aware that this is probably not the case.
A music montage near the film’s climax interrupts the flow of the rescue action to show the astronauts on Mark’s old spaceship contacting their loved ones via satellite video. A husband shows his wife a record album that he bought for her birthday, and a father delights his children by floating through the spaceship’s interior in zero gravity, swallowing water globules like a porpoise going after minnows. This is the most counter-intuitive sequence in the Although billions of people gather to watch the rescue on live TV at the end, we never get the impression that any other drama is taking place while humanity frets over Mark’s fate anywhere else in the film. Although this is a matter of life and death for Mark, it appears that the general public has forgotten about his predicament for long stretches of time. The most significant images that are shown over and over again throughout the movie are tight shots of sprigs growing out of the potatoes that Mark buried in his greenhouse. No matter what happens, life will go on.
For more personality quizzes check this: Our Kind Of Traitor Quiz.
