Why "The Martian"? Because... Science!!!

Every time I sit down to do one of these essays about a film from Sir Ridley Scott, I feel like I’m obligated to inform the reader that he or she may need to take my opinions with a grain of salt.  My fandom of Sir Ridley’s work is well-documented, and I wouldn’t blame anybody if they said my objectivity in reviewing his movies may be questionable. I like to believe that I can be reasonable enough, however, to acknowledge that he’s had some “misses” over the last decade (cough… The Counselor… cough… Prometheus… cough... ), but even those misses have had things about them to love and/or admire, though, and those qualities keep me eagerly anticipating whatever he may do next.  

Thankfully, with The Martian, Sir Ridley has hit one out of the proverbial park, and has produced a film that certainly ranks right up alongside his best work.  It is a great combination of survival story (see a guy figure out how to grow potatoes in his own poop!), detective story (wait, that photo and this photo must mean somebody’s still moving down there!) and heart-tugging rescue story (can they catch the guy in a space suit moving faster than speeding train?).

The Martian is based on the debut novel from former software engineer Andy Weir, written out of his love for all things science, and his admiration of the men and women who practice it and utilize it to explore the universe. The story is of astronaut/botanist Mark Watney (played with great charm by Matt Damon), who is left for dead on the surface of Mars when his mission is scrubbed because of a violent storm.  Left with supplies that will only last six weeks, he must find a way to not only communicate with Earth and hope a rescue mission can be sent, but also to find a way to produce enough food, water and breathable air to last the three or more years it would take for that mission to save him.  

While there is certainly enough of the Robinson Crusoe-type stuff one would expect to find in such a story, there is enough of the subsequent activities on Earth depicted that the movie is not just a retread of Cast Away set in space.  NASA comes to realize Watney has survived and struggle to find a way to deal with that knowledge and plan a course of action.  Astronauts make plans, engineers at Jet Propulsion Labs struggle to implement them, NASA administrators work to make them happen, all under the pressure of knowing Watney may very well starve to death before they can get to him. These portions of the film are filled with characters just as interesting (in their own ways) as Watney, and the movie is fortunate to be filled with such wonderful actors as Jeff Daniels, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Jessica Chastain and Michael Pena in these roles, all of whom do fantastic jobs of creating believable characters with clear motivations, all with the seemingly-limited screen time they have.

Okay, sure, we all know Mars’ atmosphere is way too thin to actually produce a storm strong enough to endanger any manned mission there (or at least those of us who didn’t sleep through eleventh-grade science class know - you all know you you are…), but any enjoyment of a movie must require some suspension of disbelief, and this great story makes it easy for us to do so.   The genius of The Martian is its handling of what is, by its nature, the most technical of human endeavors and keeping it on a level the layman can not only understand, but enjoy.  What made the novel so incredibly interesting - it’s descriptions of the methods Watney used to engineer the solutions to his problems - could have been the very thing to doom the movie adaptation for general audiences, but Drew Goddard’s script does a fantastic job of feeding us just enough science-lingo to explain what Watney is doing without bogging us down in minutia (“I’ve done the math,” an engineer explains to an administrator at one point, “it checks out”).  The entire narrative thread of the movie is propelled by this problem-solving, which is a pretty novel thing for a movie in today’s age of the big-screen shoot-’em-up spectacle that relies on action set pieces to move from one plot point to another.  

The focus of the story, though, is Watney, and Matt Damon gives a us stellar performance.  He tends to be a “quiet” actor, steering clear of roles that would require him to be bombastic or over-the-top (I’m looking at you, Sean Penn…), and this role suits him well.  Characters he portrays tend to be more reserved and rely more on emotion and body language to convey ideas, and his spin on Mark Watney is dead-on perfect for that philosophy. Watney is what we all hope we could be in such a situation, and his performance of the character is pitch-perfect.  He combats the despair of his situation not only with rational thinking, but also with wit and humor, both cleverly shown to us by means of the video logs he keeps.  Despite being more physically alone than any human being ever has, he never totally loses hope, although he does come close a time or two, as I’m sure we all would.

As I mentioned earlier, Sir Ridley has had some less-than-stellar work in theaters over the last ten years (although even those films tend to improve when he re-cuts them for home video, which could easily be the subject of another lengthy essay), but no matter what one’s opinion may be about the narrative quality of any of those movies, I defy anyone to say that his movies aren’t always beautiful to watch.  The Martian is no exception. Utilizing the region of Jordan where parts of Lawrence of Arabia were shot more than fifty years ago, along with some help from post-production color-correction, he has created an incredibly believable Mars.  His directing skills are firing on all cylinders here, and his visual choices tell us as much as the script’s words do.  Time after time, he is moving us from lush, panoramic shot of beautiful Martian landscape, to an object presenting a challenge, to a facial expression telling us all we need to know about that challenge.

You may think the plot sounds as though is not terribly different from Cast Away or Robinson Crusoe or Gravity, but the character of Mark Watney IS original.  It’s easy to say that this is a Marooned-in-Space movie, and in a way it is, but it is so much more than that.  It is a story of personality.  It is a story of perseverance.  It is a story of how calm, rational thinking can eventually overcome most any problem.  It is a story of how even those calm, rational thinkers still have emotion and must factor that into their decisions.

...and it’s Ridley Scott’s best movie in a decade, so it’s got that going for it, too.

John Carter ("of Mars," damn it...)

Upon seeing the first promotional materials for Disney’s John Carter almost nine months ago, and with each trailer, TV spot or web clip of the flick I’ve seen since, the first phrase to cross my mind each time has been “Dear Lord, I hope it does not suck…”  Let’s face it – a story that was written a hundred years ago?  If it held any appeal at all, then SURELY it would’ve been filmed by somebody at some point, right? (well, it was filmed by somebody before, a mere three years ago, but that crap was direct-to-DVD, and had Traci Lords in it, and DID suck, and was never seriously intended for wide audiences, and… but I digress…)

Anyway, I’ve been scared for this film’s fate since I first heard about it going into production more than two years ago.  Most sci-fi/fantasy nerds (such as myself) have read the John Carter books, and given my affection for them, I wanted the movie-going public to share my fondness for these stories.  However, knowing casual movie audiences as I do, I knew it would take skilled filmmakers and skilled marketing to get Joe Moviegoer to give this movie a chance.  C’mon, you can hear the questions, can’t you?  A Civil War veteran magically transported to Mars?  There’s breathable air on Mars?  Mars has people on it?  Some of those people have four arms?  What the heck is a “Thark?” Swordplay?  Loincloths?  Giant blind apes?  Yeah, surely the same audiences who long for the next Will Ferrell masterpiece or post-pubescent vampire sexual fantasy will beat down the doors to see this…  Of course, Disney didn’t help themselves one bit with their awful marketing of this movie.  Andrew Stanton’s resume was never used as a selling point, and why not??? Surely mentioning Finding Nemo and Wall-E could only have helped a potential audience gain some sort of affinity for the director’s newest work.  Not once did any of the advertising play up the fish-out-of-water theme of the movie (which is a shame, as Carter’s initial disorientation with Mars’ lesser gravity is one of the movie’s funnier moments), instead focusing on making it seem a pure action movie.  Their abysmal failure with last year’s multi-million dollar boondoggle Mars Needs Moms was almost certainly the driving factor in dropping the “…of Mars” moniker from this movie’s title (although Stanton himself denies this), leaving potential audience members who are most likely unfamiliar with the source material to wonder just what the heck a flick titled John Carter would be about.

Oh, sorry - all that being said, I suppose I really should talk about the movie a bit – John Carter is a not-entirely-literal adaptation of “A Princess of Mars,” the very first published work of author Edgar Rice Burroughs, better known as the creator/author of “Tarzan.”  The title character is a Civil War veteran (played by Taylor Kitsch, of TV’s “Friday Night Lights”) who is searching for gold in New Mexico territory and upon stumbling into a cave, is mysteriously transported to a strange land where he finds himself to have superhuman strength.  This world, called “Barsoom” by the natives, but known to us as Mars, is inhabited by strange peoples and beasts with even stranger names and titles, yet he becomes involved in their politics and wars, falls in love with a native princess and helps to save their world from the evil machinations of a god-like race.  Pretty simple stuff, for sure, but it’s pure classic pulp-fiction fun.  For Pete’s sake, who DOESN’T love a rousing yarn about reluctant heroes and princesses in danger and shady evil-doers and magic and swordfights and…?

The stories were first published in 1912, and numerous filmmakers have tried to get them to the screen in some form or another for the next hundred years, but it took $250 million of Disney’s money to finally get it done.  It’s the first live-action film from director Andrew Stanton, who, as mentioned above, brought us two of Pixar’s most beloved films and was involved in the creation of all three Toy Story films as well.  One could argue this is also an “animated” film, as there’s so much CGI involved that one wonders how anyone other than an animator could have brought such an other-worldly vision to the screen.  This movie passes the first test ANY movie must pass – it’s nice to look at.  Movies are a first and foremost a visual experience, and before anything else, they must be (in SOME sense) pleasant to see.  The costumes are fantastic, the locations and sets are incredibly detailed, the photography is first-rate and the CGI is so wonderfully done as to be almost indistinguishable from “reality,” so Stanton must be praised for that much.

Did I find fault with it?  Well, I admit to finding myself comparing John Carter to the source material as I was watching it and feeling another tinge of fear as I heard Martian (Barsoomian?) names and other information being hurled at the audience with such rapid-fire dialogue that I worried those unfamiliar with the books would miss important information, but my movie-going companion that evening had never read the books, and she assured me that she never felt left behind, so perhaps that fear is unfounded (or she’s a frickin’ genius, which is entirely possible).

For those of us who ARE familiar with the books, however, we don’t have much reason to be disappointed.  Are the characters a bit one-dimensional? Yes, but I don’t mind that in this sort of material.  Edgar Rice Burroughs was fantastic at what he did, and Ernest Hemmingway was fantastic at what he did, but they didn’t do the same thing, after all.  Burroughs, who inserted himself as a character in his Barsoom stories, is probably the character with whom we would most identify, despite his relatively minor involvement.  Stanton makes sure that we see young Burroughs’ amazement as he learns just how factual those bedtime stories his “Uncle Jack” told him actually were, but while the rest of the cast of characters aren’t very relatable, I don’t feel that they’re meant to be.  This ain’t “Macbeth” – it’s Saturday morning cartoons, and it works splendidly on that level.

In the end, I enjoyed John Carter.  I’d have enjoyed it more if Disney had marketed the movie better and not caused me such angst in the year leading up to my finally seeing it, but I suppose one could argue that this is my problem, and not Disney’s.  That said, the fears I feel from their lousy marketing job continues, as the resulting negative press (and resulting lack of box office) may prevent Stanton from being allowed to produce the next two chapters in the Barsoom saga that he has planned, and that’s a dang shame, given how well he pulled off this one.