Movie review: The Martian is out of this world

By Jay Stone

In the sci-fi adventure The Martian, an astronaut named Mark Watney (Matt Damon) gets stranded on Mars and has to survive for four years until a spaceship can rescue him. He has enough food and water for only a month, but fortunately he’s a botanist by trade, so he can make do, although it’s not easy. “I’m going to have to science the shit out of this,” he says.

By coincidence, some real-life scientists — men who science the shit out of stuff for a living — discovered the other day that there is water on Mars. This would have saved Watney a lot of trouble: he has to set fire to hydrazine, a component of rocket fuel, to make his own water. The results of setting fire to rocket fuel are predictable, even to those of us who got C-minus in Grade 12 chemistry, but such are the perils of makeshift invention. You’re either sciencing the shit out of something or having it scared out of you.

The Martian itself, however, isn’t frightening, either physically or existentially. It’s Cast Away in space or Robinson Crusoe with zero gravity, but minus the lonely angst that beset the heroes of those stories. Watney doesn’t have time for the lonely reflection of the solitary man: he’s a NASA-trained astronaut who gets down to business, keeping a video log that becomes the companion — Wilson the volleyball — of the story.

Based on a best-seller by Andy Weir, The Martian is directed by Ridley Scott, a sci-fi visionary (Alien, Blade Runner) whose best days appeared to be behind him (The Counselor, Exodus: Gods and Kings). But he’s back in form here. The Martian is a brilliantly designed entertainment that combines all the intricacies of good speculative fiction with a surprisingly lighthearted tone of survival.

That’s mostly due to Damon, who has the unique ability to make intelligence cool. He got his start as a hip rebel mathematician in Good Will Hunting, and his ironically self-aware botanist in The Martian is equally attractive. For the movie to work we have to be engaged by watching a man figure out how he’s going to use the tools at hand to eat and to get back home — an intergalactic MacGyver — and Damon is splendid company. He’s an action hero with brains; an idealized nerd.

Watney has been stranded on Mars when his fellow crewmembers escape a violent windstorm that they think has killed him, and he awakens millions of miles from home and with limited resources. Back on Earth, the head of NASA (Jeff Daniels) has the political headache of getting Watney home. He has to finesse the return of a man who has become a cult hero and do it quickly enough that the multi-million-dollar rescue doesn’t come back with a corpse.

These scenes in the NASA labs — a staple of astronaut movies since the heady days of Apollo 13 — alternate with the third storyline. The Mars crew, headed by commander Jessica Chastain, is speeding home to Earth and now must find a way to turn around and go back to retrieve the man they left behind. Normally there would be a romantic entanglement to complicate the rescue, but The Martian is happy to wallow in the scientific problems of how, say, a stranded astronaut might grow enough potatoes in soil he must create using the materials at hand or, in Watney’s case, coming out of his bottom. Everyone must think years ahead: if there is indeed a rescue, where is the best place for it and how could Watney get there?

The movie’s production crew has cloaked this story in a lot of nifty scientific equipment — cinema constantly pushes forward the frontiers of space travel — so The Martian looks authentic even as you wonder about some of the details. I assume they’re right, even though you wonder if a man forced to survive on a diet of potatoes can also make do with a soundtrack comprised of disco music.

But they’ve found water on Mars, so anything is possible.

– 30 –