The Martian

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

-Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

In her 1969 essay, Trash, Art and the Movies,  Pauline Kael reduced Kubrick’s then much-debated work, 2001: A Space Odyssey, to a parable about “tools of death”:

The ponderous blurry appeal of the picture may be that it takes its stoned audience out of this world to a consoling vision of a graceful world of space, controlled by superior godlike minds, where the hero is reborn as an angelic baby. It has the dreamy somewhere-over-the-rainbow appeal of a new vision of heaven. “2001” is a celebration of cop-out. It says man is just a tiny nothing on the stairway to paradise, something better is coming, and it’s all out of your hands anyway.

Ridley Scott’s The Martian takes the opposite approach.  Similar to the recent science fictions Gravity, Interstellar and the lesser known independent film Love, Mr. Scott’s story focuses on the human element.  Kael also famously panned his Blade Runner for its strict deference to impersonal dystopian themes and images over meaningful interaction.  Perhaps the old dog has learned some new tricks.

Botanist Mark Watney (Matt Damon) is left stranded on Mars when a dust storm cuts the crew’s mission short.  The mission commander, Melissa Lewis (Jessica Chastain), blames herself for leaving him behind once she makes the tough call to scrub the fourth manned mission to the red planet.  NASA Director Teddy Sanders (Jeff Daniels) is put in a politically precarious situation when analyst Mindy Park (Mackenzie Davis) at Mission Control discovers that Watney is alive despite all involved believing and declaring to the world that he died.

Where science fiction routinely fails, regardless of a picture’s effects budget, is that the director and writers conceive of and stage a technological failure and attempt to recover from it as the spectacle, resulting in a plot-driven story.  But the true spectacle of space exploration, for as long as we’ve been doing it (a blip in cosmic terms), lies in the collaboration between people: scientists, engineers, agencies, governments, nations, and the public, to overcome adversity of any scale when the stakes are simply unprecedented.   NASA is scheduling the first manned missions to Mars by 2030.   This gives us less than fifteen years to prepare for a journey of approximately 90 million miles, or 360 times the distance to the moon.   This distance can vary from 33 million to 250 million miles so the figure given in the movie is the result of mission timing and best case scenarios.

The cost of such an undertaking in the real world could not be borne by one government alone, approaching by some estimates more than three quarters of a trillion dollars—greater than the market value of Apple, Inc.   The only answer is cooperation, and this film introduces many players from each strata, down to eccentric astrodynamicist Rich Purnell (Donald Glover) whose reaction to a poorly calculated mistake demonstrates his utmost investment in the outcome of an operation involving hundreds of people above and below his pay grade.

Even amidst the father-daughter story in Nolan’s Interstellar, one feels as though the connection is there to facilitate a story that’s meant to visually enthrall us.  In Phil Kaufman’s adaptation of Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff, the overarching theme is one in which Charles E. “Chuck” Yeager proves himself superior to the spam-in-a-can apprehensions of the Mercury program astronauts both by pushing himself beyond his own physical limits as well as the limits of the NF-104 Starfighter he stalls at over 100,000 feet, juxtaposed against dichotomous scenes of an aging Sally Rand spreading her wings on stage.  Pietro Scalia’s editing is no less genius, seamlessly interweaving three subplots:  Watney’s highly scientific survivalist adventure, Mission Control’s management and recovery from their PR nightmare, and the Hermes orbiter crew’s eventual awakening to Watney’s plight.

If the film feels deflated for any reason, it’s not because there hasn’t been enough compressed into 141 minutes.  There are no unnecessary melodramas, no inflamed political squabbles, no idiotic plot twists.  The film focuses sharply on one central theme: Human beings can solve seemingly impossible problems when we focus and work together.  Based on the book by Andy Weir, a coda not present in the novel was added.  I won’t spoil it.  I will simply say that this film has been constructed as an invitation to those teenagers who will soon be applying to the top aerospace programs in the world including Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University and University of North Dakota’s Center for Aerospace Sciences.

Given the IPCC estimates that indicate we are past the point of no return on anthropogenic climate change in the near term, the next two hundred years are going to bear witness to suffering on a massive scale unless we, as Hayden Planetarium director and astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson puts it, start dreaming again and reach beyond our grasp.  With NASA’s recent announcement that flowing water has been confirmed on Mars, the possibility of establishing a colony has skyrocketed.

Coda: My father and I don’t get along.  But he’s a retired environmental scientist–a plant physiologist, incidentally–and the smartest person I have ever known.  His wealth of intellectual curiosity fueled mine.  That was his best contribution to the world… teaching us how to think, not what to think.  And when we turned that ability to think inward we realized, fortunately or unfortunately, the result wasn’t a happy ending.  But  the world doesn’t need to end to satiate the cynicism of damaged men like me and my generation.  I’d love to be able to say, some day, long after he is gone, “Dad, in spite of ourselves, we did it.”

Footnote: While writing this review, I overlooked the score by Harry Gregson-Williams. Perhaps I was too preoccupied with the character story. It’s an unfortunate miss on Ridley Scott’s part. His friend and collaborator Vangelis composed a live symphony, Mythodea, performed live at the Temple of Zeus, Athens, in honor of the 2001 Mars Odyssey mission. Vangelis, who has breathed new life into Hellenic culture (Sagan would be proud) with his music of the gods, also has a celestial body named after him: Minor Planet 6354 (Vangelis).