Director: Ridley Scott
Writer: Drew Goddard
Cast: Matt Damon, Jessica Chastain, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Jeff Daniels, Michael Pena, Kristen Wiig, Sean Bean, Kate Mara, Sebastian Stan, Aksel Hennie, Benedict Wong, Mackenzie Davis, Donald Glover
Runtime: 144 mins.
2015
The Martian doesn't have the imagination of Insterstellar. It doesn't have the visceral pleasures of Gravity. It doesn't have the depth of philosophy or breadth of scope that 2001: A Space Odyssey boasts. But it does have one thing: Sam Rockwell.
No wait, I'm thinking of Moon.
To figure out what The Martian has, I've found myself thinking a lot about what it doesn't. The movie follows the plight of Mark Watney (Matt Damon), an astronaut who is stranded and presumed dead on a routine mission to Mars. He must find a way to survive in increasingly unlikely circumstances, while also figuring out how to get NASA to send a rescue mission. On the other end of those 54.6 million kilometers, every facet of NASA is busily working on the logistics, ethics, and publicity angles of such a rescue mission. But mostly the logistics, because everyone in this movie is basically a good person.
That's the strange thing: There are no villains in The Martian (except for the alien crimelord Watney encounters in the underground city). The closest thing we have to an antagonist is head of NASA Teddy Sanders (Jeff Daniels), whose seeming villainy is soon revealed to be nothing more than a useful pragmatism and bullheadedness that ultimately works in Watney's favor. Everyone we meet behaves exactly as we wish they would, and as such there are no character arcs to be found anywhere in the film. Even Mark Watney decides very early on that he is going to go all out to survive, which becomes his defining and unwavering character trait.
Yet character arcs are the bread and butter of drama. How can you have a successful narrative without any personal growth? There are a few ways, and they're all very interesting, but I think the type of narrative that best fits The Martian is one I learned about through Steven Soderbergh's film Contagion. In Contagion the massive outbreak of a supervirus spreads death and chaos across America. We receive the narrative through a plethora of somewhat linked perspectives, such as a CDC worker, a sick family, and a media representative for a bogus pharmaceutical company. Just as in The Martian, the Contagion characters do not grow or change throughout the movie. They are constant forces of will working in specific roles in relation to a national crisis. Instead, it is that crisis that has the dramatic character arc. We are with it from beginning, to middle, to end, and its role mutates in relation to the people interacting with it. The virus is a more dynamic character than any of the people involved.
The crisis of Mark Watney's survival situation, and its wider repercussions, are the only arc to be found in The Martian. You could say that his situation is the main character, but I prefer a more philosophical term.
Humanity is the main character of The Martian.
When you think about it, it makes perfect sense. Humanity has spent its entire existence fighting tooth and nail against the limitations of the physical world we occupy. The more we learn about our universe, the more we feel like squishy useless little accidents. Yet, we have gone to the Moon (and in the world of the movie, Mars as well). Our delicate human bodies have climbed into metal tubes and been launched hundreds of thousands of miles through lifeless void in order to reach another planetary body. Space travel is the most significant achievement in human existence, and we have accomplished it by defeating our collective antagonist: the lifeless, apathetic universe.
This is the antagonist that every character is striving against in The Martian. Using science, a tool humanity has spent centuries developing, the characters create a united front of ingenuity and solve problem after problem in the face of death. The Martian is a struggle for human life, and a procedural scientist's wet dream. It's a love letter to humanism. By the time we reach the climactic sequence, a flat out brilliant tapestry of suspense, the perspective is jumping between Watney, the rescue crew, the folks at NASA, and even crowds of civilians watching with rapt attention to see how the drama will play out. All of humanity is bound up in this moment, and the swell of emotion we feel is of a rare and strange variety. Usually a well-made movie will make us feel proud, or happy, or depressed about one person or a set of people. But The Martian is a near unique experience in that its best moments make us feel a swell of emotion on behalf of all humanity. That is an incredible feat that could only be pulled off by a master filmmaker.
That man in question is Ridley Scott, who joins this year's club of old-men-who-everyone-thought-were-washed-up-but-then-blew-everyone-away.* Scott has had a mixed bag of a career, especially lately, but when he's on he's on. Despite being given a set of characters without obvious emotional beats, he manages the feat of keeping the audience invested and engaged.
*I'm looking at you, George Miller.
Of course, the best choice a director can make is to surround herself with a rogue's gallery of talent, and Ridley does that here. MVP goes to cinematographer Dariusz Wolski, whose Mars landscape shots are hellishly captivating. Establishing shots do a very specific job of setting tone in movies, but here in particular The Martian would be a far worse movie without images of the vast, red, lonely wasteland. They provide a feeling of desolation even when Matt Damon's character is too proud to do so.
Damon nails the character, of course. He digs into the charisma and pride of one of the smartest men in the world stuck in one of the most hopeless situations. The Martian is the opposite of a psychological film, but Damon makes the most of the scattered moments he has to display cracks in his handsome facade. A large part of why this largely sterile and procedural narrative remains fun to watch is the cast in general, which is packed with so many talented stars in minor roles that you can't help but be drawn in by this massive collaboration.
Props also go to editor Pietro Scalia for balancing all these perspectives, making clear the logical progression of the film, and keeping things moving along at a brisk pace. The Martian is a narrative of constant escalation, as brilliantly penned by the excellent screenwriter/director Drew Goddard, and Scalia handles that escalation with aplomb.
My praise for The Martian is high, though it remains far from my favorite movie of the year. It's a film that works best on a grand scale, but if you isolate any given moment it is simply good. That is partially because we cannot fully invest in any of these characters, only their plight. Perhaps the science-heavy narrative also keeps us at arm's length. These are the sacrifices the movie makes in order to deliver its climactic humanity fist-pumping achievement. It tries to ameliorate the coldness with humor, which works pretty well. But this ain't a Pixar movie.
The more I think about The Martian, the more I like what it accomplishes. I have a far higher estimation of the movie as a whole than I did of any particular part while watching it. I feel the movie is also arriving at a key cultural moment. More subtly than Interstellar, it begs us to look to humanity's future, and believe in what we can accomplish. So much of our current cultural narrative is cynical doom and gloom, so it's an exhilarating wake-up call to be given a movie that believes we can do great things. We're not limited to an American flag on the moon. We can go farther.
3.5 / 5 BLOBS
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