The Martian: a stranded Ridley Scott comes back to Sci-Fi following the dust trail of John Ford
★ ★ ★ ★ ☆ (Sci-Fi lovers rejoice!)
Sand is thrashing the tarpaulin that separates instant death from you. 33.9 million miles of solitude separates you from the rest of humanity, food is running low and all you've got is your will to survive and the music of Donna Summers.
This is the premise of "The Martian", Ridley Scott's 20th film after “Blade Runner” and first attempt to science fiction since the maligned “Prometheus”.
Every time Scott comes out with a Sci-Fi flick my mind is raptured by memories of “Alien” and “Blade Runner” in ecstatic expectation before the painful hodgepodge that was “Prometheus” slowly creeps up like a venereal disease to mar all the love I had once felt for those Sci-Fi classics.
My question stepping in the crowded cinema on 42nd street was: “Can Ridley Scott redeem himself from “Prometheus” with this screen adaptation of the homonymous novel by Andy Weir?” The answer is, I'm relieved to say, a resounding "Yes". But because the bar for Ridley Scott is so high, I am going to be pretty demanding here. "The Martian" is not, like its predecessors were, a master class in cinema that redefines a genre.
“The Martian” is a good Sci-Fi film, probably more entertaining than “Interstellar” and less cerebral than “Ex Machina”, but unlike “Alien” and “Blade Runner”, it doesn’t challenge expectations and it doesn’t add to the genre canon either. I am sorry to say this, but when you are Ridley Scott, your biggest competition will always be your own ghost and that, my friends, will always be a tough nut to crack.
Having said that, “The Martian” did nail me to my seat for all of its 140 minutes, skillfully jostling me between moments of thrill and wonder.
I haven't read the novel so I cannot compare the two but the story was peppered with enough scientific restraints to make it believable … except perhaps when at times I thought I was watching a 1950s Sci-Fi B movie. You know? Where the like of Buck Rogers would adroitly jump between one hurtling spaceship to another and still manage to hold onto a beautiful woman… although maybe not ‘exactly’ as you see in “The Martian” ... If you have seen the film (and by now who hasn’t?) you probably know what I am talking about.
This is one of those Sci-Fi movies where so much real science is on display that you'd be forgiven if you forget that after all it is still 99% fiction.
A lot of the sets were in fact inspired by real life. Much of the interior hallways of the Mars bound spacecraft were good replicas of tunnels you find on the International Space Station. The Martian rover was actually inspired by the never deployed moon rover from the Bush 2 era.
And let’s not forget to mention the 1997 space probes featured in this film... that's not Sci-Fi at all, that’s just history now!
Never the less, every time Jeff Daniels and Chiwetel Ejiofo were cooking up numbers for a rescue mission with 1% chance of success, my suspension-of-disbelief left for a toilet break. After all, back in 2003, NASA has a similar opportunity to a much easier rescue mission and failed.
All in all I enjoyed this film and while I was witness to Mark Watney’s fight for survival, on the inhospitable red planet, I thought about the beauty of our own blue marble. I begun thinking that before we set off to colonize other planets probably we should learn how to steward the one we've got already. I know it’s a little stretched, but at least that’s how I’ve read the symmetry between the sprout at the end and the potato sprout on barren and desolated Mars.
There was something fascinating about the extra terrestrial setting of this film which reminded me of John Ford’s classic western films where large format Panavision captured the monumental landscapes and reduced the lonesome cowboy to nothing more than a speck of dust below the far reaching horizon. I don’t think I'm too far off saying that Ridley Scott took some inspiration from “The Searchers”. The parallels between Matt Damon as Mark Watney and John Wayne as Ethan Edwards are easy to make, as both are self-reliant white men who dare to face the vast frontier’s unknowns.
I never was a big fan of John Wayne though. I could never go beyond the fact the all of his characters were cartoonish and over simplified. Perhaps this is a critic I could also make of Matt Damon’s Mark Watney. Besides a few moments of self-doubt and humor that helped instill some humanity into his character, I’ve found Watney incredibly cheerful, borderline delusional or at least very short sighted. This is in keeping with Hollywood traditional all-white-all-American-all-male superhero paradigma. Unfortunately that is how "The Martian" lost in scope. By loosing the feel for Watney's utter solitude and the challenges that come with it, it became just a series of entertaining MacGyver moments, reminiscent of Henry Thoreau building his log cabin by Walden pond.
For the sake of my argument, there are Sci-Fi films out there that capture well what it must be like living for long stretches of time in complete solitude, locked up in the void of space or on a desolate planet. Films like “Moon”, “Solaris” and “2001: A Space Odyssey”, just to name a few, give you an idea of what it must be like to face the emptiness of space alone. You can choose to ignore the existential consequences of facing the infinite but Great Cinema embraces them.
It probably would have been a bit too much for most audiences. The film already runs at 140 minutes, add to that Matt Damon’s galactic ennui and you will end up with some severely alienated viewers (forgive me the pun).
Maybe my childhood hero, the director behind “Alien”, would have been daring and visionary enough to include that existential element in “The Martian”, just a touch of poetry and style as to keep everyone involved to the end. You know? This is the guy that created "Blade Runner" after all.
I guess I have to surrender to the facts of life, growing up we bear witness to our childhood heroes growing old and that “The Martian” could have been ‘Amazing’ but instead settled down to be just ‘good’.
Yours Truly,
Gabriele
P.S.
Can I say how wooden Jeff Daniels was in this film? Why?? See attached picture of Jeff Daniels as NASA chief Teddy Sanders:
