Riddley Scott’s The Martian is a world apart
Ridley Scott’s name carries a certain weight in sci-fi circles and rightly so: His work from the 80s sci-fi basically redefined the genre with Alien and Blade Runner. With that, the expectations from The Martian, Scott’s latest work had very high expectations attached to it. Hot on the heels of magnificent and well received hard science fiction movies like Gravity and Interstellar, The Martian delivers a roller coaster cinematic experience that celebrates the human spirit and gets you laughs on the way as well.
The Martian is based on a novel by Andy Weir. Weir’s novel contends with the trials and tribulations of a lone astronaut stranded in the red planet alone, with limited supplies and surviving due to pure spirit and will. Scott has taken the novel’s signature humour and the scientific accuracy and given us a cinematic experience that both rivals his earlier sci-fi works and gives modern audiences a taste of a modern-day Robinson Crusoe.
The movie’s feel can be best described as Cast Away meets Apollo 13. Like Apollo 13, it contends with an accident involving NASA and seeing the engineers and scientists quickly figuring out a way to fix that problem from hundreds of thousands of miles away. The tension is palpable and the setbacks make you feel how real the stakes are. Like Cast Away, the movie takes a single man, stuck on hostile territory, taming it and surviving against all odds. The triumph of the human spirit is a major theme in both.
The movie has a start studded cast: Matt Damon plays Mark Watney, the protagonist but he’s not the only big name. You have Jessica Chastasin, Kristen Wiig, Kate Mara, Donald Glover, Chiwetel Eijofor and even Sean Bean in a rare role where he doesn’t die. The cast embraces their roles well: Matt Damon channels his earlier role from Interstellar, except this time he is more hopeful and less crazy. A special mention goes to Glover’s Rich Purnell: He is the crazy scientist that stays up for days in JPL and still manages to surprise you with too-crazy-to-work ideas that work anyway and might transform the world later. He plays that as the scientist only focused on fixing the problem and nothing else. Donald Glover’s character was more in tune with the Danny Pudi’s Abed from Community, who was Glover’s character Troy’s best friend in the show.
The science of The Martian is solid: The novel already had most of the science worked out and Ridley Scott managed to not only preserve it but at points enhance the scientific realism. I am willing to excuse the initial storm which caused the story to occur as a necessary evil, but the rest of the science was actually very well done. As a science fiction fan and a science fan by passion, I really enjoyed the attention to detail in the movie. The space-potatoes and how Watney grows them was a stroke of genius. The system of watering his makeshift potato-garden was hacking at its finest and while it was inefficient, it was still amazing. One of the best bits was re-establishing communication. Using hexadecimal encoding with a circle was one of the high points of the movie. The two gripes I would have about the science are the lack of the gravity adjustment and the precipitating event of the storm, but the former is barely noticeable with everyone wearing heavy space suits and the former can be forgiven because it kicked off the amazing movie.
The Mars in the movie was very well depicted. It is believably depicted and the desolation and isolation is well communicated. In 3D, you could almost feel that you were on the red planet itself. The cinematography was exquisite and the majestic landscape made you wonder if one day we too could be there.
One of the highlights of the movie was the humour. Watney does not lose his sense of humour even in the worst circumstances. The strength of the human spirit is depicted through Watney’s humour. The scene where Watney poses as The Fonz for a photo-op is as hilarious as the one where Watney claims, and rightfully so, that he is the first man to colonise another planet and exclaims “Take that, Neil Armstrong”. Watney does not lose his humour, despite the various setbacks and the problems he faces, including the destruction of his habitation and loss of crops.
The Martian was an enjoyable experience. In a world that is torn apart by turmoil and people are bombarded by bad news every day, movies like The Martian give us hope and hearken back to the time when we were explorers and could set aside our differences and work together for the greater good. This hope is what we need the most at this point in time. The Martian gives us hope and reminds us of how resilient and hardworking the human race is. It is a ‘must watch’ for any sci-fi fan.
The Martian is directed by Ridley Scott. It stars Matt Damon, Jessica Chastain, Kristen Wiig, Jeff Daniels, Michael Peña, Kate Mara, Sean Bean, Sebastian Stan and others. The 141-minute long movie was released on September 11, 2015.
Rating: 4.5/5
