The Martian (2015)

Directed by Ridley Scott; produced by Mark Huffam, Teresa Kelly, Simon Kinberg, Michael Schaefer, Ridley Scott, Aditya Sood

An emergency forces the latest manned mission to Mars to evacuate the planet but, in the confusion, one of the astronauts (Matt Damon) is believed killed and his body lost. He is, however, not dead, and, when he regains consciousness, must survive alone on an unforgiving planet, with no discernible chance of rescue until after his supplies have run out.

A couple of years ago, I reviewed Robinson Crusoe on Mars, a movie with a similar premise to The Martian. The two are interesting for their comparisons and contrasts. The earlier film incorporated more fiction in its science, partly due, no doubt, to its setting being much less known when the movie was produced than it is now. The Martian relies on real science, as opposed to conjectured science. It is neither a better nor worse film for that, but is, after all, quite different.

The Martian’s chronological setting is not given, wisely, and it can be assumed that it is but a few years in the future. The technology - as far as my limited grasp of such a subject allows me to judge - is almost all extant. Clearly, some items, such as the interplanetary spaceship that takes the explorers from Earth to Mars, and the landing craft, have yet to be built.

Nonetheless, they are credible and are, probably, already designed and simply awaiting a couple trillion dollars’ allocation. This use of existing and barely futuristic inventions makes the story believable. Using items that have yet to be conceived (eg. transporter beams, suspended animation technology) would have given the solutions to the problems too much of a deus ex machina feel.

More than the science, though, The Martian depends upon the leading actor, Damon. While unlike Robert Redford in All Is Lost, reviewed a few weeks back, Damon is not the only character in this film. Indeed, once his plight is established, the scenes alternate among Mars, Earth and the spaceship with the other astronauts aboard.

This gives a less claustrophobic feel to the movie than had All Is Lost. It also adds a sense of urgency; All Is Lost did not have that (yet the fact that no one knew the sailor was in danger lent melancholy, even despair, to his situation.) In The Martian, there is much more of an atmosphere of collaboration, reminiscent of Apollo 13; (one of the latter picture’s lines is used in The Martian.)

The script is good, but perhaps the weakest aspect of the film. We are not forced to infer what Damon is thinking all the time, as he records his thoughts and activities in a computer diary and, later, in communications with Earth and his fellow astronauts. There are some concessions to contrivance: Damon’s existence is due in part to finding potatoes stored by another explorer for a future Thanksgiving celebration, and Damon’s expertise in botany is essential to his survival; if he had been a geologist or astronomer, his chances would have been bleak. Also, the climax borrows more from Hollywood than NASA.

One feature that helped the script was that it included no villains. Jeff Daniels as the director of NASA comes closest, but his motivation is his responsibility to the entire space programme, while other characters have the luxury of worrying about one man. Chiwetel Ejiofor has a good role as the mission controller, and Sean Bean an atypical part as the diffident manager of the interplanetary spaceship programme. There are, perhaps, too many attempts to show how nerdy all the people at NASA are. This does provide a funny scene at a meeting when all the men present show their knowledge of The Lord of the Rings, with the lone and befuddled woman (Kristen Wiig) expressing half-feigned exasperation.

The direction, as may be expected from Ridley Scott, is very good. It manages to create a sense of the adventure’s breadth, almost epic in scale, while retaining an intimate feel as it puts us in close and immediate contact with people we don’t know but will learn about. There is a ‘docu-drama’ effect that works very well.

Despite the running time of nearly two and a half hours, The Martian never drags. It keeps artificiality to a minimum, and maximises its entertainment value.