by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I finally
got to watch The Martian, a major
science-fiction from from 2015 starring Matt Damon as Mark Watney, crew member
on the Ares III mission to Mars
(and in this version of history the Mars missions are being run by NASA, not
private companies as Eyton Kollin had advocated in the Mars panel at the ConDor
science-fiction convention Charles and I have been attending this weekend) who
gets left behind, sort of like Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone, when the other members of the crew evacuate themselves
and their spaceship when a Martian storm is about to topple it over. The
Martian began life as a serial novel by
Andy Weir, published chapter by chapter on the Internet, and while the movie
isn’t a serial the serial-style plot construction is very obvious. The whole thing intercuts between Mark
surviving on Mars and making it through whatever plot complications Weir and
the screenwriter, Drew Goddard, can pick up, and the folks back at NASA, headed
by Teddy Sanders (a seedy-looking Jeff Daniels) and Vincent Kapoor (originally
written as an East Indian but rewritten to be African-American after the Indian
actor they originally wanted had a prior commitment in Bollywood, and played by
Chiwetel Eijofor — who’s stuck in a suit and tie through the whole movie so we
never get to see him shirtless, darnit), debating whether or not to try to
rescue Mark, whether to tell the crew members who left him for dead on Mars
that he’s still alive (they’re making the 20-month journey back to Earth), and how to rescue him if they decide they want to.
Ultimately after a series of complications — Watney, a botanist by trade,
figures out a way to grow potatoes on Mars (leading to a lot of potatoes-on-Mars jokes I wasn’t getting until we
saw this film), only another storm blows open his hydroponic dome and the
Martian cold freezes his plants, so he can eat the potatoes he’s grown (with
his own and the other astronauts’ shit as his fertilizer — this is shown in
almost repulsive detail, complete with the earplugs Mark puts in his nostrils
to control the odor) but can’t grow anymore; the unmanned probe they launch to
get him more supplies blows up in space and they have to enlist the aid of the
Chinese space program; his food runs out and his rations get ever smaller; and
finally he has to launch himself into space and cut open his spacesuit to
propel himself when the Ares III
finally returns to Mars to pick him up — Watney is finally rescued and returned
home. The Martian got rave
reviews from both critics and fans, but I regard it as a very good movie but
one that just misses greatness. The plot is well-constructed — in fact a bit too well-constructed — and in the end no one actually
dies; it’s the sort of film Frank Capra might have made if he’d done a
science-fiction movie (and Capra actually started on the film Marooned, only to get fired while the movie was still in
pre-production; Marooned is still
quite Capra-esque and there are strong parallels between it and The
Martian even though the doomed astronauts
in Marooned are only in Earth
orbit, not on Mars). It kept my interest and I liked the film overall (and was
gratified that in general the women gave stronger performances than the men —
whether Hillary Clinton wins the presidency or not, movies like this indicate
that Americans are willing to accept women as authority figures at least in
fiction, if not in fact!), but there was a spark of greatness I missed.
Matt
Damon is part of the problem; he’s superficially “right” for the part but he’s
always struck me as someone, like Elizabeth Taylor and Julia Roberts, too much
in love with his own good looks, too willing to turn to the camera, stare at it
and ask it, “Here I am! Ain’t I beautiful?” (Paul Newman did that in some of his early films, but as he grew as an actor he got over
it.) I remember when I watched The Brothers Grimm I noted from one of the imdb.com “trivia” posters
that Johnny Depp had originally been up for Damon’s role in that, and I said in
my blog post I thought The Brothers Grimm would have been better with Depp in Damon’s part. So would The
Martian, though the actor it really needed
was Sean Penn about a decade ago; Damon simply doesn’t have enough of an “edge”
as a performer to convince us that he’s a man on the thin edge of starvation
and understandably upset that an organization with enough of a high-tech
infrastructure to get him to Mars can’t figure out a way to get him back or
even keep him alive while there. I quite liked The Martian; it was directed by Ridley Scott, who’s very good at
this sort of sci-fi actioner (remember Alien? Blade Runner?), and he found a location in Jordan that’s an almost perfect stand-in
for Mars, or at least the popular imagination of what Mars looks like. (An
earlier Mars movie, 2000’s Red Planet, was filmed at the same location.) Ironically, the studio work,
including all the interiors, was done in Hungary, at the studio Alexander Korda
established there initially before he relocated to England, and one imdb.com
poster noted that the buildings that serve as the exteriors for the headquarters
of NASA and its Chinese counterpart are only a few blocks away from each other
in Budapest.
The Martian is a
quality movie, it’s refreshingly serious (in fact a bit too serious; about the only comic relief is Watney’s
disgust that the only music he has to listen to is 1970’s disco, courtesy of
the captain of the Ares III, who
brought no other recordings — and it’s a relief to us when David Bowie’s “Starman” is heard in one
sequence and we actually get to hear a good song from the 1970’s! And it’s not a memorial to
Bowie since he was still alive when this film was released to theatres) and
obviously aimed at adults (indeed Watney’s succession of F-bombs itself becomes
one of the film’s few jokes). It’s just one of those frustratingly good movies that
could have been even better; as I said of Ship of Fools, it aspires to greatness and achieves goodness.
