The Martian

Film (2015)

With Matt Damon (Mark Watney), Jessica Chastain (Melissa Lewis), Kristen Wiig (Annie Montrose), Jeff Daniels (Teddy Sanders), Michael Peña (Rick Martinez), Sean Bean (Mitch Henderson), Kate Mara (Beth Johanssen), Sebastian Stan (Chris Beck), Aksel Hennie (Alex Vogel), Chiwetel Ejiofor (Vincent Kapoor)

In the midst of a terrific Martian windstorm, the crew of the Mars mission under mission commander Melissa Lewis (Jessica Chastain) needs to blast off without one of their own, Mark Watney (Matt Damon), who has gotten blown away too far from the spacecraft for immediate rescue and who is presumed dead.

Miraculously he survives, picks himself off the Martian rubble, and is forced to use his wits to figure out how to communicate with the earthlings, headed up by Teddy Sanders (Jeff Daniels), who all think he’s a goner. Other equally ingenious innovations follow, putting on the spot those at home base, and on the return spacecraft, about what to do with him.

This quite routine space movie is saved by routine injections of somewhat witty and unexpected dialogue, and, of course, by the Meister Martian himself, Mark Watney, played by the appealingly self-reliant Matt Damon. Watney is forced to figure out all sorts of things and Damon gives him enough facial puzzlement and down-to-Mars gusto to make us believe he can do the impossible.

Eventually, he has to figure out how to eat and drink and what he comes up with is the core of the movie. Watching Damon’s Watney as interplanetary farmer is a nice touch, and it doesn’t hurt to add just a little yuckiness to the whole endeavor. The film survives as a variant of the lone pioneer’s tale, playing heavily on the great American themes of self-reliance and ingenuity, with an added dose of tinkering, farming and the wilderness of our potentially tameable planetary neighbor.

The rest of the talented cast is way underused. Jessica Chastain, an excellent actress who held the military intelligence thriller Zero Dark Thirty (2013) tautly and intelligently together almost single-handed, plays mission commander Melissa Lewis here, a role that requires a lot of official space talk and not much acting. There is some funny back and forth about music playlists, but it’s episodic and doesn’t amount to much.

Other good actors, Kristen Wiig (Annie Montrose), Michael Pena (Rick Martinez), Kate Mara (Beth Johannseen) and Chiwetel Ejiofor (Vincent Kapoor) essentially get put out to interstellar pasture here, adding to the list of stars but not given space to produce much dramatic light.

The popularly appealing but somewhat hokey rock playlist tuned carefully to the appeal of its target movie-going audience, however, is the other thing, besides somewhat spicy dialogue and stick-to-it inventiveness, that adds panache to this rescue drama. Watney likes to complain about it, but it’s clear it’s meant to draw a crowd as well as provide a moment or two of fun.

The narrative itself, apart from the farming on Mars part, is pretty weak. How a second spaceship winds up conveniently on Mars is anybody’s guess. Most of the script is devoted to solitary musings and mutterings, executing improvisational survival techniques and then negotiating about what eventually to do about a guy living alone on Mars.

The 3D screen I saw it on wasn’t the best, so I won’t judge that, though what effects I did see were fairly unremarkable.

As in the narratively weak, CGI-fest Gravity (2013), there is a lot of space gymnastics which get the heart throbbing.

Apart from the extra rocket which just happens to be sitting around, there’s some other stuff that seems a bit strange – like, why, if Mars has so much less gravity than earth, does Watney not seem considerably lighter on his feet? That should have been an relatively easy one to simulate, but it doesn’t seem to matter here.

No one can complain about spending a couple of hours on an abandoned planet with Matt Damon. He’s a professional likeable guy, with a capacity for appeal on the same latitude as Tom Hanks, despite some of his own darker past roles. Add to that some of Robert Redford’s existential ingenuity on the high seas from All is Lost (2013) and some of the space twirls from Gravity and you have the makings of an all-around hit which, in this case, is pretty much a case of aurora borealis, a play of lights that provides a cosmic show without much substance beneath.

The most stellar thing about this whole enterprise is that Andy Weir, the author of the novel on which the film is based, frustrated by not being able to get published by a print publisher, released the book serially online and distributed it for free until, after some initial success, he made it available on Amazon as a download for 99 cents. At that point it became an instant hit and was subsequently picked up by a print publishing company which turned it into a bestseller.

– BADMan