The Martian
Director: Ridley
Scott
Writer: Drew
Goddard
Starring: Matt
Damon, Jessica Chastain, Jeff Daniels, Chiwetel Ejiofor
Rating: Four stars
out of five
Available in
theaters now
The Martian is
a movie that trains its eye on the mechanics of storytelling and does
not let go for an instant. It creates a cinematic experience that is
relentlessly devoted to getting an audience from point A to point B
as logically and expeditiously as possible. But also, along the way,
this love letter to efficiency creates a warmth and pride in humanity
that makes one feel a vast amount of pride for the accomplishments,
both realized and still in our future, of homo sapiens.
And
much of the heavy lifting is done not by The Martian's
famous director, Ridley Scott (Alien,
Blade Runner) but by
screenwriter Drew Goddard, who co-wrote and directed what remains the
best horror (probably the best comedy, too) film of the decade, The
Cabin in the Woods. Goddard's
writing, based on the novel of the same name by Andy Weir, crackles
with the inherent fun of exploration and is filled with good humor.
But above all else Goddard prays at the altar of functionality.
Every
beat of the movie pivots on the introduction of conflict, resolution
of a conflict, or the consequences of the preceding two things. And
the script is happy to be obvious about this mechanized approach.
Star Matt Damon, as NASA astronaut Mark Watney, has been left on Mars
after an accident caused his crew to believe him dead. In a turn both
pragmatic and revealing of character, Goddard's script gets Damon
talking right away. The science station outpost Watney calls home for
much of the movie is rigged with video diary cameras ostensibly for
the scientists on the Martian surface to report their findings to
NASA back at home. However, once his crew mistakenly leaves him
behind, Watney (and the script) turns to the cameras to keep his mind
busy and not go crazy from isolation. So he's stuck on a planet where
nothing can grow, he tells the camera/confidant, but good thing he's
the crew's botanist and he can figure out ways to farm himself some
potatoes. And the script uses this trick, although sometimes not
specifically Damon talking to the camera, over and over until the end
of the movie. It's simple. It's elegant. It's baldly telling the
audience what it is doing every step of the way and it is much to the
film's benefit.
It's
all basic Storytelling 101, but it is so habitually forgotten in all
forms of entertainment that the way Goddard goes so hot and heavy on
this stuff is worth applauding.
Even
still, those mechanics would not be enough if they were all that
drove The Martian. They
can get a little too cute in certain moments, but luckily the movie
has several aces up its sleeve. The characters, and the actors
playing them, are what makes the movie sing. It is surprisingly not
all the Matt Damon show, despite him being the rooting interest for
the viewer. The movie takes long stretches to let the audience live
with the other people in the NASA program, those who are trying to
bring him home for reasons that are sometimes not entirely about
concern for Watney's life and safety.
Jeff
Daniels, as the director of NASA, is hardly a bad person and he wants
to get Watney home safely, but his overall worry is whether the
fiasco of leaving an astronaut stranded on Mars will end the
program's government funding – for him, this is a terrible thing
but he's concerned it will be used as a reason to put the kibosh on
further human exploration. Chiwetel Ejiofor's Vincent Kapoor is
another higher-up in the NASA hierarchy, but he has to deal with
communication with Watney, thus giving him more personal urgency in
the astronaut's return, despite his obligation to keep the program
running. So on and so forth for every character in the movie. Each
has differing shades of motivation and the qualifications each
character places on what would be a “win” in this seemingly
impossible rescue mission is the stuff of superb storytelling.
For
all the time it takes to let the audience enter the mind space of the
non-Damon characters, he is the driving force of everything. He is
good-natured, proud of his accomplishments, and never stops believing
in what he and others can do. These are fairly standard heroic
attributes, but Damon, Goddard, and the director Scott take things
further. There is an appreciation
in Watney for everything he experiences. Even the most awful,
disheartening, and frightening experiences fill him with awe in
addition to their primary effects. Everything teaches him something
and he is glad to learn it.
Watney
is a character who trumpets a full-throated optimism, and The
Martian as a whole does the
same. It treats the ambition to learn more about the world around us
as a self-evident good. And that's something to appreciate in itself.
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