The Martian Review | Archive

00:00:21
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00:00:42
Speaker 2: Our Oscars theme may be over, but we do have another Best Picture nominated film up for our Wednesday archive drop. It's The Martian from Ridley Scott. This is an adaptation of the Andy Weir novel, and yes, it is inspired by this weekend's big release project, Hail Mary. I don't know if you remember this review if you heard it originally here on film Spotting when the film came out in October twenty fifteen. The premise of my setup is basically that this movie is just incredibly satisfying, and I can't imagine anybody not liking You don't have to love it, you don't have to think it's a masterpiece. You don't have to think it deserved to be a Best Picture nominee. But it's hard for me to imagine anybody watching it and being deeply dissatisfied with it, and I look at Letterboxed and I gave it four stars. Josh Larsen gave it four stars. Sam Van Halgren rated it twice and gave it four stars. Why can't there be more movies that deliver this particular kind of pleasure so satisfying? There's that word satisfying. Other friends here on letterbox well, Matt Singer let me down a little bit, mcguy veron Mars three and a half stars, David Simms, I really enjoy it when Ridley Scott has fun. Four stars. Even Mike DiAngelo, who seems a little bit hard to please sometimes, gave it four out of five stars. On letter Boxed, though there is well David Erlic he did, and I love David. Two stars in space Literally everyone can hear you tell and tell and tell and not show for two hours of tedious science porn in crap three d Abba, though maybe that's the problem. He saw it in three D. I didn't see it in three D. I gave it four stars. I wonder how many stars you gave it. Let's revisit The Martian from October twenty fifteen.

00:02:35
Speaker 3: I guarantee you that at some point everything's going to go south on you, really, and you're gonna say, this is it, this is how I end.

00:02:49
Speaker 2: It's Amanda Marcus dead.

00:02:50
Speaker 4: We have to go now.

00:02:57
Speaker 3: You can either accept that or you can get to work.

00:03:03
Speaker 2: The last time it was my turn to do one of these intros, the film was Black Mass which I knew going in. Neither of us Josh cared for. So I challenge you to come up with one thing you liked about the movie.

00:03:14
Speaker 4: You're a mister positive.

00:03:15
Speaker 2: Indeed, turns out that was a challenge. Even your compliments were backhanded. I'm going to recycle this conceit for The Martian, but with a twist. Unless you think I was just in too much of a hurry to come up with something a little more clever, I mean, come on, after all, The Martian is a movie about an astronaut abandoned on Mars, forced to survive on his creativity, intelligence, and sheer determination. Surely I could have compelled myself to try a little harder while sitting comfortably at the coffee house a few hours ago, eating a scone and drinking a Horchata latte while Matt Damon's Mark Watney got by on potatoes grown in his own Well, maybe best we don't talk about that. Let me say this. I walked out of The Martian thinking something I rarely think, walking out of a movie. How could anybody not like that? Not going to make your top five or ten films of the year list, not going to rush back to the theater and see it a second or third time, Not when you're going to run out and buy on Blu ray the second it's released. Fine, I can get behind all of that. But a bad movie, boring, unentertaining, unfunny, not well shot by director Ridley Scott and DP Darius Volski, who shot Dark City and Scott's Prometheus, and he also just released The Walk not well acted by Damon and Jeff Daniels and chewtel edg Four as NASA directors, and Jessica chess Stain and Michael Pania, among others, as Watney's crew members. The Martian is unhatable? What am I missing? Josh? What did you dislike about The Martian? And I'll even spot you A potential answer is its utter inoffensiveness, in fact, its downfall. Say what you will about Prometheus, a movie that, despite its surface level similarities and shared director. I have no desire to dwell on during this review. It had grand ambitions. Some people loved it, some people like you mostly loathed it. But it provoked passionate responses. So the Martian aims high enough or too amiable.

00:05:00
Speaker 4: It's a crowd pleaser for sure, yeah, isn't it. I mean, this thing is probably going to stick around and be amidst the Oscar talk because it does hit all those buttons, and it hits them well. I liked it better than this, but usually the Oscar Winner is about a three out of four star movie for me that I appreciated, and I'm not surprised to see it win because it is so crowd pleasing. The Martian no better than that, I think does work in those ways. If there's something that holds me back a little bit, maybe it is to the degree that it is crowd pleasing towards its end, or the way it amps that element up, because I very much think one of the strong qualities of the film is its optimism. It can do spirit, the way that Damon's Mark Watney is just going to get the job done no matter what else happens. He's not going to sit around thinking about it or philosophizing about it. He's going to get the job done, and that infiltrates into the entire spirit of the film. I do think when this expands in the scenes where NASA, the NASA engineers and scientists and executives back on Earth are trying to put together a rescue plan for him, and the entire globe gets in on this and they begin watching and cheering him along, I felt it got a little we are the worldish in a way that put me off. I mean, by the point even the Chinese Governmental Space Agency is willing to lend a hand, You're starting to get in a little wishful I think, you know. I mean, everyone's just politics hands around the globe to get this guy home.

00:06:35
Speaker 2: Though, if you think about it, just for one second, if you see this whole movie in some ways as a reality TV show, and it is right, it's like being a Big brotherhouse. It turns into that on him all the time, whether he has an audience or not. He's talking as if he has an audience, and when we get the whole globe behind him, just feel like this would be one galvanizing incident that maybe the whole world. Could you know what?

00:06:59
Speaker 4: That's what the movie wants you to believe, And it's certainly that's why you go out feeling so good, because it does make you believe it. But I think there's I think that's worth questioning and maybe even puncturing, because it seeps into earlier parts of the film too, even into things like these Martian vistas that Scott shoots so much jestically, and it has this arid sepia color scheme, but still they're not necessarily threatening areas.

00:07:29
Speaker 2: That scar that we're worried about.

00:07:31
Speaker 4: They are more that they have the feel of territories that should be explored, if not conquered. So there's a very manifest destiny feel to this film that perhaps some people could find troubling. I think that's an element that's worth questioning, and I think it does get amped up towards the end. But really I was enthralled by this thing, and it's not the type of science fiction that I usually go for. I am more the philosophizing type. I love Solaris, I love two thousand and one, A space Outysey, I even love The Fountain, one of my favorite Aronofsky films. So those are the kind of movies that generally appeal to me when it comes to science fiction. I'm also not a guy. It'll take me a while to get a handle on a socket wrench. You know, that's not my natural affinity. I can figure it out, but you know, give me a little while. And so a movie that's based on just prack to Cole, yeah science, they're playing science but also just doing the work and around worrying about what it all means. You know, I thought that Scott and Damon, you know, his performance has a lot to do with this, made it compelling every second that it was on the screen.

00:08:39
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm with you. I love procedurals. I feel like I talked about this recently on the show, but went back through my notes and maybe I'm misremembering. Movies about process I think fascinate a lot of people. They really fascinate me, even when, and maybe especially when they're about processes that are completely foreign to me. As you just said, don't know my way around a socket wrench, certainly don't know my way around botany or any type of astrodynamics. So a lot of the science turns out it's mostly duct tape you go, you know, yeah, well that's a nice little nod to the practicality that this movie espouses. I also love movies about problem solving, and that ultimately is what this movie is about. A character does verbalize it at one point, but it's solved one problem. Another one's going to develop, probably, but you just keep solving them until there are no more problems, hopefully. And my loan complaint, if I was going to try to answer my own prompt there, is that it does run into the issue a little bit that most really detailed, deliberate procedurals run into, which is it devotes so much time to the process that when the plot has to kick in in the end, so the movie can you know, end, our hero does either have to make it back home, be rescued, or die trying, it really has to compress time to get there, which also does kind of violate the spirit of the whole movie up to that point. It's day by day by day, moment by moment, and then all of a sudden seven months later, and I feel a little bit lost by that, or I feel like it does, as I said, violate the spirit of the movie.

00:10:05
Speaker 4: Fair question two. One thing I didn't quite feel as directly as I thought maybe we needed to. Was the passage of time. There's a section where all of the sudden, Watney looks very different.

00:10:16
Speaker 2: Yeah, aftads later.

00:10:18
Speaker 4: Instead of that being gradual, you know, it hits us. So I think that's a fair critique too.

00:10:23
Speaker 2: Yeah. I do appreciate as well. And you mentioned this with the more philosophical sci fi movies you get behind like a lot of cinephiles, I would say I feel similarly. But I really appreciate that this movie ends up being quote unquote existential, I think, and it does offer some profound moments without ever having to strain for it. I think, true to the procedural nature of it, Wattney's existence on Mars alone is sufficient, that's sufficiently existential to make you think about a whole host of really serious thing. His simple survival on Mars really is grand enough, I think.

00:10:57
Speaker 4: And he doesn't have to vocalize it. I think you're absolutely right. One of the sequences that captures that well. And this goes to Damon's performance, which maybe we should talk about. You know, there's just something inherently can do about the guy in matter of fact, to me, playing spoken, and you know, the Departed shows us that something of a ruse, that he has other layers, but for the most part, that's his persona fits so perfectly for this, and maybe too perfectly. There's maybe a way in which which he doesn't let us into. That hardened exterior shell is so formidable here where he's not gonna crack at all no matter what he faces, and maybe we could say I'd like to see a little bit more of the inside. But we get one moment where I think that existential nature, again without being plainly spoken, comes down on us pretty hard. It's after there's a breach in the research station where he has holed up and he has to essentially put a sheet of plastic between himself again more duct tape and the Martian atmosphere, the lethal Martian atmosphere. A storm comes by and we hear the wind sucking in and out that plastic, so it's making this flapping, popping, howling sound, and it's a brief shot of Watney trying to ignore it, trying to perform another task, and at one point he just kind of stops and lets out this low moan, and it's one of the lasting scenes in the movie for I think, because it again suddenly gets at what he's really feeling way underneath. But in the manner of this, just trying to go about and do his regular work.

00:12:32
Speaker 3: Right, Let's do the math. Our service mission here was supposed to last thirty one souls for redundancy. They sent sixty eight souls worth of food. That's for six people. So for just me that's going to last three hundred souls, which I figure I can stretch to four hundred five rations. So I got to figure out a way to grow.

00:12:51
Speaker 4: Three years worth of food here.

00:12:53
Speaker 3: On a planet where nothing grows. Luckily, I'm a botanist.

00:13:01
Speaker 2: The script was written by Drew Goddard, who was part of the team behind Lost, and he co wrote and directed the very meta Cabin in the Woods, And that's a film that obviously really dissected before our very eyes the horror genre. And at the end of the film, when I saw his credit pop up, I was wondering what drew him to material this ostensibly straightforward, And maybe it was just that that it is pretty straightforward. Maybe it was a paycheck. Who knows. He did his job well, though it did occur to me that one potential little subversion to this genre. And I do think obviously there is a rescue genre that this movie fits into. Is the way there is nobody waiting for Mark back on Earth except NASA people and other crew members. But they see him as more of a colleague, a fellow professional, not so much a family member, even though those lines, of course are sometimes lord, but that whole notion of professionalism and being part of a crew is something this movie devotes a whole lot of time to. And so we get Watney up there on Mars, never pining for his wife or his born or unborn kids, nor do we see them thinking about him and pining for him to return. Our interest in him getting back to Earth isn't caught up in anything emotional. I love that it's just about the achievement of it. We're caught up in him simply accomplishing the task, him simply solving the problem.

00:14:24
Speaker 4: Yeah, and that diverges from Apollo thirteen, which otherwise the movie very greatly resembles. Obviously, that's historically based, so you have the families that we know were there this movie.

00:14:35
Speaker 2: This movie isn't historically based.

00:14:37
Speaker 4: This has not happened in that Okay, so I told you science, you got to get out a little bit more. Yeah, so, yeah, I think that that is a key point. There's one reference where he's preparing a goodbye letter to his parents, which I think is helpful in just giving us some context that he didn't just emerge from another planet. This is a guy with some roots on Earth. But it does push then the idea of the colleagues as family because he is abandoned. We shouldn't give away how but he is abandoned by a crew that was on Mars with him early on in the movie's opening scenes, and they do essentially become his family, especially when they learn that he has survived and they want to be part of the rescue plan. They're not informed of it right away. I will say, you know, thinking about things that maybe didn't quite work. The whole NASA handling of the information and what to let out, the whole pr angle of this film to me felt like a little bit of wasting time or force, like they were trying to generate some drama beyond what else they had, because essentially, you know, they're worried about the world blaming NASA for leaving this guy behind.

00:15:47
Speaker 2: I think that's all legit. I felt for all that not.

00:15:50
Speaker 4: If they I mean, if the particulars of what we see of how it happens. Again, we won't give away the details. But if they had let that out, no one we would have been singing we are of the world a lot sooner.

00:16:00
Speaker 2: No, I think the movie did address that, and it all made sense to me, at least the pr point of view. You touch on a moment though for me, that is one of two really standout moments in the movie. And as much as I'm talking about how it doesn't strain for profundity or doesn't strain to be overly emotional, there are, along with many laugh out loud moments, and I did laugh out loud multiple times in this movie, there are emotional moments in poetic moments. And I joked, of course in the setup, that I can't imagine anybody hating this film or even not liking it. So after I wrote that setup, I went to Rotten Tomatoes to see if there are any dissenters, and sure enough, of course, there are a few of them. One of them, Stephanie Zahik, wrote in The Village Voice that as elaborate and expensive looking as the Martian is. It's almost totally lacking in poetry, and I guess it depends on your definition of poetry. It's definitely not two thousand and one or Solaris or even Interstellar or Prometheus. But that moment, that low mown moment when something bad has happened and he hears the wind howling and he knows that his life depends on that tarp. That dread really comes through in that moment in Damon's performance, knowing that as far as he's come, as long as he has survived, he's done the unthinkable to survive this long. He's no longer in control of his own destiny, and you know what, he probably never really was, but he thinks he is. There's a bit of that hubris about him after a while, that he is kind of conquering and colonizing this planet and that no longer is in play anymore. And so that moment is really powerful. And I think there's another one even more powerful. It's when he's communicating with NASA for the first time, and I think it's Edgiophor who writes to him, we've been watching you since day fifty four, and this is now forty or fifty days, I think after day fifty four, and it's another subtle but emotional breakdown type of moment that Damon has. And yes, we of course expect to watch a character finally communicating with someone back on Earth and maybe getting a little bit emotional, or in other films like this, if they were communicating with a loved one, clearly they might have a breakdown moment like that. But with Damon, it's not just a cry, it's something from the gut. It's an existential yelp, just at the knowledge that the whole time he thought he was alone in the universe, it turns out he wasn't. And I found that very moving as well. So I love that the movie makes time for those types of moments and that they have that bit of nuance to him.

00:18:29
Speaker 4: Damon has a really good moment too, near the climax, where he has sort of a gut level teary reaction to something. I put it up there with Matthew McConaughey's similarly tiary moment in Interstellar. What I really like, also, though about this film and Goddard's screenplay in particular, is the way it has a lot of fun skirting profundity as well. And I think of the scene where we sneak up on Watney as he's watching a rerun of Happy Days. We notice he's twirling a crucifix and he's deep in thought and you.

00:19:03
Speaker 2: Start for a second, Oh, here we go contemplating his place in the universe.

00:19:06
Speaker 4: He's going to give us some real, meaningful bit of wisdom. And he just suddenly pauses and says, the problem is water. It shouldn't come up as a surprise at that point, but that is how this guy thinks. What is the practical problem?

00:19:20
Speaker 2: I need to say. Yeah, I think Damon is really good in this role. I think there is a certain dead pan quality to Watney, and at the same time he can ham it up for the camera at times as well. He does that very well. The dialogue too, from Goddard throughout it feels like Aaron Sorkin without the flashiness of Sorkin. And I say that as someone who generally likes Aaron Sorkin's dialogue. But it's never hear about the words or how they're said, but it's still I think, very sharply written. And speaking of Sorkin, we could praise different performances. But just thinking about Aaron Sorkin, I couldn't help but watch Jeff Daniels and think about the HBO series The Newsroom, which I did watch, and just the way Daniels, very good actor, calibrates his performance here and plays someone very similar to the character he plays on The Newsroom, a guy who is the boss who's working with a lot of younger people, is frequently exasperated or should be exasperated. But he does just alter it a little bit. He alters his persona a little bit so that the smugness that does come through with his character on The Newsroom, a smugness that comes from the way that he walks into every room assuming he's the smartest guy in the room. But he also probably is the smartest guy in the room. Here he's surrounded by some of the most brilliant minds in the world. So Daniels just dials it back a little bit, and there's a more vulnerable side to him, despite the fact that he does have an all business problem solving exterior. I really like Daniels here.

00:20:45
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think he's good. I did not have a problem with his performance in the NASA scenes, and I also did not have a problem whenever they would switch it to the engineers or scientists doing their work, which again is drawn directly from Apollo thirteen. But I loved those sequences as well, and this proves to be a worthy air to that really good film.

00:21:06
Speaker 3: And how to say, Mark Watney, we need the Hermi's crew.

00:21:09
Speaker 2: We either have a high chance of killing one or a low chance of killing six.

00:21:13
Speaker 4: Are not risking their lives. It's bigger than one person.

00:21:17
Speaker 2: No, that's not boy. I think that was one of those reviews where Josh and I walked out of the screening and had to go immediately to the studio there at WBEZ and record our review. Not one of our longer film Spotting conversations, but a fun one for us because it was a fun movie. We hope you enjoyed that conversation that was from the Film Spotting Archive, and you get access to that Film Spotting archive as one of the benefits of being a Film Spotting Family member along with bonus shows, a weekly newsletter at free shows, early access to events, and more, and you can learn more at Filmspottingfamily dot com. This conversation can serve no purpose anymore, but bine