Ridley Scott (2015)
The crew of Ares III, a manned mission to Mars, are forced to abandon the planet quickly when a huge ‘Martian storm’ hits their base there. One of the crew – wrongly presumed dead – is left behind. The Martian is the story of Mark Watney’s DIY survival on Mars and, once NASA discovers he’s still alive, the political and scientific calculations involved in rescuing him. Ridley Scott is not a humorist but there are quite a few jokes in the script. Most of them made me slightly embarrassed but plenty of those flocking to see The Martian may well feel differently. The jokes include a running joke. The only music available for Mark to listen to in the crew’s temporary artificial Martian habitat is the compilation of disco tracks of which the mission commander is fond. Mark keeps telling us how much he hates disco but the songs keep him going. The great soundtrack kept this viewer of The Martian going too – in spite of the funny ha-ha aptness of some of the titles (‘Don’t Leave Me This Way, ‘I Will Survive’) and although it’s stretching it to include ‘Starman’ in a disco line-up. Whatever one thinks of the attempted comedy and the choice of music, both are nifty ways of sustaining a light-years distance between the often playful register of this film and the pompous solemnity of last year’s Interstellar. The Martian doesn’t have either the instantly distinctive look or the brevity of the sci-fi-smash-hit-before-last, Gravity: this new film (141 minutes) is a lot closer in running time to Interstellar (169 minutes) than to Alfonso Cuaron’s movie (91 minutes). But Ridley Scott is willing and able to give the audience – or, at least, those who take their science fiction not too seriously – a much better time than Christopher Nolan.
The Martian has a screenplay by Drew Goddard, based on a best-selling 2011 novel of the same name by Andy Weir. Scott and Goddard realise that the Cast Away-in-space narrative isn’t enough on its own for a big-budget movie. (Perhaps Andy Weir does too – I’ve not read the book – although telling the story wholly in the form of Mark Watney’s diary might be less of an issue in print than it would be on screen.) Ridley Scott’s balancing of sequences on Mars and on Earth is well judged – the terrestrial politicking gets better as the film goes on – and he’s breezily brazen about artificially delaying narrative developments in order to achieve more impact when he chooses eventually to use them. For example, there’s a point, well after NASA knows that Mark has survived, when you start to think the other members of the Ares III crew, en route back to Earth in their spacecraft Hermes, have been forgotten about more than Mark ever was. It’s pretty weak that the NASA people don’t discuss the pros and cons of informing the rest of the crew that he’s still alive – and especially hard to believe NASA would have nothing more than an awkward silence with which to answer Mark, when he eventually asks what his Ares III colleagues think about his survival. Mark’s mother and father must have ticked a ‘no publicity’ box: we never get to see them or learn how they’re feeling – their son on Mars seems to remember his parents’ existence only late in the day. In spite of the concerns expressed by NASA’s head of public relations about the PR implications of each major plot development, we get no sense at all of public reaction – until, in a globetrotting montage, the populations of the world’s great cities gather in the streets to watch, on giant screens, the climactic, successful attempt to rescue Mark. (Even I found this eventual pick-up sequence exciting.)
The Wikipedia article on The Martian sets the story in the 2030s; according to Michael Wood’s review in the London Review of Books, some conscientious viewers have narrowed things down to a single year (2035) and Andy Weir has confirmed they’re correct. But Ridley Scott and Drew Goddard follow Weir’s example in the novel of not being temporally specific. This is sensible for two reasons: first, it limits the need for the film-makers to make adjustments to planet Earth as it is today; second, because the audience’s perspective isn’t dominated by an awareness that events are happening in a very different time, there’s a real salience to the various kinds of resourcefulness shown by Mark (who’s a botanist), NASA boffins and an eccentric astrodynamics whizzkid. For a scientific ignoramus like me anyway, this felt like an unusual instance of the science and the fiction of sci-fi being nicely and quite enjoyably balanced.
Matt Damon’s performance as Mark Watney is entirely successful. Damon’s relaxed, low-key acting is ideal for the role and the device of Mark’s speaking to camera as he records a video log a simple, effective way of reinforcing Damon’s engagement with the cinema audience. The strict rationing of emotionality ensures that, on the rare occasions that Mark does get upset, they register. Jessica Chastain builds her portrait of Melissa Lewis, the Ares III mission commander, very skilfully: she conveys Melissa’s continuing sense of guilty responsibility for leaving Mark behind without ever losing the professional, bossy edge which reminds you that, and why, Melissa’s in charge. Although she doesn’t immediately strike you as a disco music fan, Melissa definitely livens up once she gets word from her husband on Earth that he’s managed to find a vinyl LP of Abba’s greatest hits in a fleamarket. The crew members also include Aksel Hennie, Kata Mara, Sebastian Stan and Michael Peña. As often before, Peña is the sympathetic Latino member of a team – fortunately, he really is sympathetic.
Back at mission control … as Teddy Sanders, the NASA supremo, Jeff Daniels needs more distinction early on between his press-conference and behind-closed-doors faces. Daniels grew on me, though, and is particularly funny in the scene in which Rich Purnell (Donald Glover), the thinking-out-of-the-box astrodynamicist, demonstrates to NASA top brass the maths (?) he’s done to devise a way for the Hermes crew to turn back and pick Mark up from Mars. Chiwetel Ejiofor is good, and surprisingly entertaining, as Vincent Kapoor, NASA’s Mars mission director; and I particularly liked Mackenzie Davis’s witty, well-judged playing of Mindy Park, the junior satellite planner who’s the first to pick up that Mark Watney is still alive. Kirsten Wiig is OK as NASA’s head of PR – it’s just that I kept expecting her to deliver a punchline and she didn’t. In contrast, Eddy Ko and Chen Shu, as the representatives of the Chinese space agency, which decides to lend NASA a technological helping hand, are inadvertently comical. The chi-chi outfits and hairdos they’ve been given are, at any rate. The only significant NASA player I didn’t care for was Sean Bean, as Mitch Henderson, the Hermes flight director. I realise Henderson is meant to be dourly conscience-driven but Sean Bean is tedious beyond the call of duty.
As usual with a techno-blockbuster, I’ll take it as read that the special effects are brilliant – except that the body double for the supposedly emaciated Matt Damon is highly unconvincing. (Damon’s square-shaped head makes it hard for him to look gaunt – even when you can tell, in the later scenes, that he himself has lost some weight.) Although it’s inevitably eclipsed by the disco classics, Harry Gregson-Williams’s score is commendable for being less portentous than the music in this kind of movie tends to be. As a result of the Martian storm, Mark Watney sustains an abdominal injury: he has to remove the spike of an antenna buried in his flesh and stitch himself up. This repair to an astronaut’s stomach seemed to rhyme, rather satisfyingly, with the explosion of the alien organism out of John Hurt’s chest in the first Alien thirty-six years ago. I walked out of that Ridley Scott movie but I didn’t find it difficult to see The Martian through. This is higher praise than it sounds.
12 October 2015
