The Martian

The Martian stars Matt Damon as part of a scientific mission to Mars sometime in the not-too-distant future. In the opening minutes, he gets injured and left for dead as his fellow crewmembers abandon the Red Planet during a severe storm. After this rushed (and not especially engaging) opening, Damon’s plucky, optimistic botanist Mark Watney must “science the shit out of” the many overwhelming impediments to staying alive for the 400+ days it will take before any kind of rescue mission could be mounted.

Back on Earth, after grieving Mark’s loss NASA officials eventually discover he is in fact still alive. So now they, too, must put on their thinking caps and get to work finding solutions—both technical and political—to the many obstacles in the way of bringing Mark home alive. In this regard, The Martian plays like a 141 minute version of the suspenseful 10 minute sequence near the end of Ron Howard’s Apollo 13 when NASA and the three-man crew aboard the damaged spacecraft must figure out how to use the limited resources on board to get back to Earth before the oxygen runs out. But Apollo 13 was produced in 1995, when major Hollywood movies were still ostensibly made for adult audiences. Twenty years later, it seems any picture over a certain budget level must be written to be completely understandable by the average fourth-grader every step of the way.

Granted, films like Apollo 13 didn’t require viewers to do all that much mental heavy lifting, but they at least trusted that we had some basic intelligence and the capacity to follow a narrative; that we didn’t need all the spoon-feeding of information that The Martian serves up. If director Ridley Scott were aiming this adaptation of Andy Weir’s best-selling sci-fi novel at grown-ups it would contain about two-thirds less dialogue. And the skilled director of Alien and Blade Runner would focus on the potentially fascinating and emotionally gripping details of his protagonist’s predicament. 

I haven’t read Weir’s novel, but I can imagine how, in prose form, this story could be a real page-turner, transporting readers into the mind and feelings of the main character. But the movie never takes us out of our seats to place us in Mark’s dire situation. Quite the contrary, the techniques the filmmakers employ keep us at an extreme distance for the entire picture—at least until the brief climax, which is exciting but not half as exciting as similar sequences in recent films like Gravity and Interstellar (and pretty much any other movie involving the manned space program). 

The Martian could have played like a slick, modern retelling of the 1964 film Robinson Crusoe on Mars, but instead it comes off like a mega-budget version of a movie cooked up by elementary schools for the express purpose of getting kids excited about learning.  Scott and screenwriter Drew Goddard seem to care about little more than conveying to their audience the basic scientific concepts used by Mark Watney and NASA to solve their problems. But there is little drama, zero suspense, and nothing to actually excite you about smart people. The film would have us believe that “science” is all about rolling up your sleeves and “getting to work”; that complex solutions come from believing in yourself and never giving up on the members of your team. These platitudes are the stuff of bad American movie clichés, not scientific breakthroughs.

The structure of The Martian is basically: Mark has a problem; Mark finds a solution to that problem; NASA has a problem; NASA finds a couple of solutions and tries to pick the best one. Repeat.  But we never experience how Mark and the others figure out their solutions. In Mark’s case, we just watch and listen to him report back to us via his video diary the specifics of what he did and why it worked. Apart from his first order of business, getting food to grow on a planet with no water, he never uses ingenuity to stay alive; he uses knowledge. In cinematic terms, this is not a semantic distinction, it’s the difference between engaging drama and passive entertainment. On the rare occasion someone does encounter a major setback, it becomes just another problem to solve with duct tape, faith, or good-old American self-reliance in the next scene. At no point in this movie do we ever have any doubt that Mark is going to make it back to Earth alive—that’s a major fault for a film like this, especially one with such a hefty running time. 

When Weir’s book came out it was marketed as a cross between Apollo 13 and Cast Away (Robert Zemeckis’ 2000 drama about a shipwrecked Tom Hanks). While Damon is every bit as likeable an everyman as Hanks, Scott and Goddard lack Zemeckis’s and screenwriter William Broyles, Jr.’s skills at conveying the experience of being marooned and alone for years with little hope of rescue. Damon never seems to be alone because he’s constantly chatting away to the audience via the ham-fisted device of his video diary.  His entries are full of little wise cracks and ironic commentary—none of which feels authentically like what someone dealing with profound, extended isolation would do.

Similarly, all the dumbed-down science the other characters constantly explain to each other is shouted to the back row of the theater. There’s nothing more insufferable to sit through than a sci-fi movie where supposedly brilliant engineers, physicists, or biochemists speak to each other as if they’re all as clueless about their specialties as a typical 12-year-old moviegoer. But this seems to be par for the course for contemporary blockbusters. 

Much of the blame here must fall to Goddard, who, since his first feature Cloverfield in 2008, seems to believe that in order for audiences to relate to his protagonists he must write all the characters as if they’re high school goofballs who learned their social skills from reality television. To be fair, not every character in The Martian is presented in this way—and the behavior of these highly skilled astronauts and scientists is not as absurdly juvenile as their counterparts in Scott’s previous sci-fi blunder, Prometheus—but for a film that’s clearly going for scientific accuracy, most of its particulars ring utterly false.

The Martian doesn’t state how far in the future its story takes place, so maybe by its time most scientists and engineers will be sexy hipsters with teenage emotions who look like they stepped out of a GAP add. But for the most part, gifted people in these professions are quirky, socially awkward men and women, who often process their emotions in ways that are entirely different from average folks. They’re not always the most well groomed individuals, and they often possess an idiosyncratic sense of humor. But apart from one token Lord of the Rings reference, none of these details are present at the NASA of The Martian. I certainly don’t mean to imply that Hollywood movies can’t present a more glamorized reality, but I can’t fathom why filmmakers would actively choose to avoid most of the distinctive personality aspects of their subject in favor of generic characterizations. 

The inappropriate casting of all-star supporting players doesn’t help the sloppy writing. With the exception of Damon and Chiwetel Ejiofor as a senior NASA engineer, no one in this picture brings any credibility to their paper-thin roles.  Jeff Daniels and Sean Bean don’t play the kind of jovial yet serious company men you’d actually find at NASA, they play two opposed ideologies—the simplistic tropes you find in underwritten movies. And while Jessica Chastain, Kate Mara, Michael Peña, and Kristen Wiig are all terrific actors, I don’t buy them for a second in their respective roles in this film. Donald Glover has a small but key part that provides a glimpse of what a more interesting version of this movie might look like, but here his scenes feel as contrived as the rest.

Scott, cinematographer Dariusz Wolski, production designer Arthur Max, and their CGI team pull out all the stops when it comes to rendering an immersive world, superior to those found in typical contemporary 3D blockbusters. But it’s all for nothing because the characters and plotting are so bland and artificial. Not for one second did I buy into the illusion that Damon was on the surface of Mars, nor was I convinced his fellow crewmembers were on a spaceship rather than an impressive set. (Frankly, I couldn’t even suspend my disbelief enough to accept that the Johnson Space Center was in Texas—everyone populating it sure seemed like they lived in LA to me.)

All these flaws wouldn’t be so problematic if The Martian were more of a plot-driven, high-concept fantasy film, but the entire intention behind this picture seems to be to make a character-based, science-based dramatic thriller.  Judging it on these criteria, I have to say that, while a watchable enough piece of entertainment, The Martian fails at nearly every aspect of its mission.