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#610 - The Martian
Ridley Scott, 2015
When a freak storm causes an astronaut to be presumed dead by his crew and stranded on Mars, he must improvise his own methods of staying alive until help arrives.
I observed a while back that there was something of a trend developing over the past few years where every year gets at least one big space-themed film that is treated as one of the year's most important cinematic events. Last year had Christopher Nolan's save-the-humans epic Interstellar, the year before that had Alfonso Cuarón's taut survival thriller Gravity, and the year before that one gave us Prometheus, Ridley Scott's return to the mythology of his break-through space-horror film Alien. My opinion of each film varies quite wildly, which meant that there wasn't really any telling how 2015's The Martian would pan out. One can pick out how much it not only follows this trend but also incorporates elements of each of those three films. In addition to being directed by Scott, it is like Gravity in that its plot revolves around a single astronaut (Matt Damon) being stranded in space and trying to survive the harsh environment by any means necessary. The most blatant similarity to Interstellar will be immediately obvious to anyone who's seen Nolan's film, but it also covers the complex series of problems that arise as the NASA staff and the other members of Damon's crew must try to deal with rescuing him. However, for better or worse, The Martian does an alright job at defining itself as a separate entity to any of those other films.
After quickly establishing its core premise within a handful of very turbulent minutes, the film then sets up Damon as he gets ready to use his expertise as a botanist in order to grow enough food to survive the four-year wait until the next scheduled mission to Mars. Meanwhile, his activities eventually draw NASA's attention as the staff try to figure out not only how to communicate with him but also how to rescue him - and that's without factoring in their quandary over whether or not to inform the other members of his crew (who still think he is dead and are in the middle of their months-long journey back to Earth). While Damon's early attempts to acclimatise to his situation (both figuratively and literally) are fairly fascinating in their own right, the story soon encounters quite the narrative paradox. On the one hand, there's only so much interest that Damon's isolated problem-solving can generate on its own even with the conflicts caused by malfunctioning equipment and other setbacks. On the other hand, the scenes that don't feature his character are admittedly necessary to the story but that doesn't stop them feeling way too utilitarian as a result. They may be buoyed by quite the collection of dependable actors, but that's only because, deep down, you know they have to be.
Given how much of the film ends up being a one-man show featuring Damon, you'd naturally expect him to pull some serious weight as he more or less has to carry several sequences on his own. To his credit, he does not do a bad job - at least his somewhat comical video-journal narration about his tasks and experiences provide a favourable enough reminder of his against-type work as an eccentric whistleblower in Steven Soderbergh's The Informant!. However, the humour level never quite manages to rise above mild amusement even as his experiments backfire explosively or as he tries to deal with the fact that the only available music is disco (and he hates disco). He's marginally better at selling dramatic moments, such as his steadily growing desperation and frustration in the face of some serious setbacks that leads him to think that, despite his many moments of progress, he still might not get out of his situation alive anyway.
Unfortunately, this does mean that the rest of the cast gets some short shrift as they are left to fill out some fairly archetypal roles, especially the other members of his crew. As the ship captain, Jessica Chastain adequately conveys her guilt over having left a presumably dead Damon behind, while everyone else in the crew gets extremely slim characterisation that is all tempered with the same slightly comic edge afforded to Damon. It is thin to the point where a romantic sub-plot between Kate Mara and Sebastian Stan really does seem to come out of nowhere. At least Michael Peña and Aksel Hennie do alright in their roles as the excitable pilot and deadpan chemist respectively. The people back on Earth gets some rote roles to fill out, with Jeff Daniels serving as the classic conflicted executive trying to pick the least horrible course of action while also clashing with Sean Bean's flight co-ordinator and Chiwetel Ejiofor's engineer. Ejiofor is always a solid actor, even though the fact that he's cast to play a presumably Indian character is definitely a bit of a distraction. Experienced comedic actors such as Kristen Wiig and Donald Glover get some minor yet significant roles that don't really pay off; this is especially true in the case of the latter as he offers the latest in a long line of variations on the eccentric genius stereotype, even though that amounts to little more than making me feel like I'm watching Troy do an impression of Abed.
Fortunately, with Scott behind the camera there is a strong chance that the resulting film will turn out to at least be technically and aesthetically solid. In the case of The Martian, the depictions of both Damon's adventures on the surface on Mars and his crew-mates' journey through space are captured with considerable aplomb. The detail involved in both settings being adequately reflected through the art direction and production design. The craggy red deserts of the planet surface are rendered well, as are the various artificial environments and the cold yet starry vacuum of space. This much extends to the exhaustive amounts of detail put into nearly every aspect of the film, especially when it comes to showing how Damon has to solve problems such as food, water, power, and communication. While the visuals are easily a strong point in the film's favour, this sadly does not extend to the soundtrack. Veteran composer Harry Gregson-Williams creates a sporadically solid score that can easily be ignored, though some of the film's licensed soundtrack choices are a bit questionable. Having Damon be stuck with nothing but disco tunes is amusing enough at first (look no further than the sequence where he attempts to groove along to Donna Summer's "Hot Stuff") but the film's decision to include a montage set to the tune of David Bowie's "Starman" is obviously a bit too on-the-nose and is enough to pull me out of the movie for a bit.
The Martian has an admittedly interesting premise, but it's hamstrung by the fact that it's a little on the long side and fails to provide interesting variations on some very familiar space-mission tropes. While the talent on display is enough to guarantee that the resulting film doesn't feel like an offensively terrible mess, it struggles to provide a film that's consistently strong on its own terms. Watching Damon go about his survival business on the planet surface is definitely engaging to watch, but cutting away from that to showcase NASA's side of the story does seem to drag things out as it follows an extremely standard narrative. A comical approach to the honestly terrifying concept of being stranded on a distant planet is a good direction to take (especially in opposition to the dour extinction narrative presented in Interstellar), but even having Drew Goddard of The Cabin in the Woods infamy adapt Andy Weir's source novel for the screen isn't enough to make for a wholly entertaining adventure. The jokes are passable, whether it's Damon making various snarky comments about his situation or the NASA staff reacting to some of his more outlandish actions. The comical approach doesn't even extend to the film indulging a lot of space-movie clichés, especially considering the fact that there are way too many scenes of people cheering in the mission control room. Such scenes were overused to the point where I was hoping that the film would try to play them for laughs as it did with so many other things. In trying to set itself apart from the overly serious films mentioned earlier in the review, The Martian sadly ends up being more or less the same despite its humourous bent.
Ridley Scott, 2015
When a freak storm causes an astronaut to be presumed dead by his crew and stranded on Mars, he must improvise his own methods of staying alive until help arrives.
I observed a while back that there was something of a trend developing over the past few years where every year gets at least one big space-themed film that is treated as one of the year's most important cinematic events. Last year had Christopher Nolan's save-the-humans epic Interstellar, the year before that had Alfonso Cuarón's taut survival thriller Gravity, and the year before that one gave us Prometheus, Ridley Scott's return to the mythology of his break-through space-horror film Alien. My opinion of each film varies quite wildly, which meant that there wasn't really any telling how 2015's The Martian would pan out. One can pick out how much it not only follows this trend but also incorporates elements of each of those three films. In addition to being directed by Scott, it is like Gravity in that its plot revolves around a single astronaut (Matt Damon) being stranded in space and trying to survive the harsh environment by any means necessary. The most blatant similarity to Interstellar will be immediately obvious to anyone who's seen Nolan's film, but it also covers the complex series of problems that arise as the NASA staff and the other members of Damon's crew must try to deal with rescuing him. However, for better or worse, The Martian does an alright job at defining itself as a separate entity to any of those other films.
After quickly establishing its core premise within a handful of very turbulent minutes, the film then sets up Damon as he gets ready to use his expertise as a botanist in order to grow enough food to survive the four-year wait until the next scheduled mission to Mars. Meanwhile, his activities eventually draw NASA's attention as the staff try to figure out not only how to communicate with him but also how to rescue him - and that's without factoring in their quandary over whether or not to inform the other members of his crew (who still think he is dead and are in the middle of their months-long journey back to Earth). While Damon's early attempts to acclimatise to his situation (both figuratively and literally) are fairly fascinating in their own right, the story soon encounters quite the narrative paradox. On the one hand, there's only so much interest that Damon's isolated problem-solving can generate on its own even with the conflicts caused by malfunctioning equipment and other setbacks. On the other hand, the scenes that don't feature his character are admittedly necessary to the story but that doesn't stop them feeling way too utilitarian as a result. They may be buoyed by quite the collection of dependable actors, but that's only because, deep down, you know they have to be.
Given how much of the film ends up being a one-man show featuring Damon, you'd naturally expect him to pull some serious weight as he more or less has to carry several sequences on his own. To his credit, he does not do a bad job - at least his somewhat comical video-journal narration about his tasks and experiences provide a favourable enough reminder of his against-type work as an eccentric whistleblower in Steven Soderbergh's The Informant!. However, the humour level never quite manages to rise above mild amusement even as his experiments backfire explosively or as he tries to deal with the fact that the only available music is disco (and he hates disco). He's marginally better at selling dramatic moments, such as his steadily growing desperation and frustration in the face of some serious setbacks that leads him to think that, despite his many moments of progress, he still might not get out of his situation alive anyway.
Unfortunately, this does mean that the rest of the cast gets some short shrift as they are left to fill out some fairly archetypal roles, especially the other members of his crew. As the ship captain, Jessica Chastain adequately conveys her guilt over having left a presumably dead Damon behind, while everyone else in the crew gets extremely slim characterisation that is all tempered with the same slightly comic edge afforded to Damon. It is thin to the point where a romantic sub-plot between Kate Mara and Sebastian Stan really does seem to come out of nowhere. At least Michael Peña and Aksel Hennie do alright in their roles as the excitable pilot and deadpan chemist respectively. The people back on Earth gets some rote roles to fill out, with Jeff Daniels serving as the classic conflicted executive trying to pick the least horrible course of action while also clashing with Sean Bean's flight co-ordinator and Chiwetel Ejiofor's engineer. Ejiofor is always a solid actor, even though the fact that he's cast to play a presumably Indian character is definitely a bit of a distraction. Experienced comedic actors such as Kristen Wiig and Donald Glover get some minor yet significant roles that don't really pay off; this is especially true in the case of the latter as he offers the latest in a long line of variations on the eccentric genius stereotype, even though that amounts to little more than making me feel like I'm watching Troy do an impression of Abed.
Fortunately, with Scott behind the camera there is a strong chance that the resulting film will turn out to at least be technically and aesthetically solid. In the case of The Martian, the depictions of both Damon's adventures on the surface on Mars and his crew-mates' journey through space are captured with considerable aplomb. The detail involved in both settings being adequately reflected through the art direction and production design. The craggy red deserts of the planet surface are rendered well, as are the various artificial environments and the cold yet starry vacuum of space. This much extends to the exhaustive amounts of detail put into nearly every aspect of the film, especially when it comes to showing how Damon has to solve problems such as food, water, power, and communication. While the visuals are easily a strong point in the film's favour, this sadly does not extend to the soundtrack. Veteran composer Harry Gregson-Williams creates a sporadically solid score that can easily be ignored, though some of the film's licensed soundtrack choices are a bit questionable. Having Damon be stuck with nothing but disco tunes is amusing enough at first (look no further than the sequence where he attempts to groove along to Donna Summer's "Hot Stuff") but the film's decision to include a montage set to the tune of David Bowie's "Starman" is obviously a bit too on-the-nose and is enough to pull me out of the movie for a bit.
The Martian has an admittedly interesting premise, but it's hamstrung by the fact that it's a little on the long side and fails to provide interesting variations on some very familiar space-mission tropes. While the talent on display is enough to guarantee that the resulting film doesn't feel like an offensively terrible mess, it struggles to provide a film that's consistently strong on its own terms. Watching Damon go about his survival business on the planet surface is definitely engaging to watch, but cutting away from that to showcase NASA's side of the story does seem to drag things out as it follows an extremely standard narrative. A comical approach to the honestly terrifying concept of being stranded on a distant planet is a good direction to take (especially in opposition to the dour extinction narrative presented in Interstellar), but even having Drew Goddard of The Cabin in the Woods infamy adapt Andy Weir's source novel for the screen isn't enough to make for a wholly entertaining adventure. The jokes are passable, whether it's Damon making various snarky comments about his situation or the NASA staff reacting to some of his more outlandish actions. The comical approach doesn't even extend to the film indulging a lot of space-movie clichés, especially considering the fact that there are way too many scenes of people cheering in the mission control room. Such scenes were overused to the point where I was hoping that the film would try to play them for laughs as it did with so many other things. In trying to set itself apart from the overly serious films mentioned earlier in the review, The Martian sadly ends up being more or less the same despite its humourous bent.