The Martian

I read the book, The Martian, this summer and the moviemakers have done a very good job of bringing it to the screen. Most of all, I love this movie because it is a fantasy about NASA the way I wish it were, with infinite budgets to do really cool stuff. In reality, funding cuts have prevented NASA from developing a mission to send astronauts to Mars. But The Martian, like the movie Gravity, is science fiction that seems like reality. It is set in the present day or the near future, and it makes use of technology and knowledge that we have available today. In fact, The Martian is so realistic that some people on the internet believe that it is based on real events. Unfortunately, we haven't been to Mars yet. But it is wonderful to see it on the screen.


I really love the main character, astronaut Mark Watney. His running commentary and one-liners for every situation, no matter how dire, keep the movie entertaining and help to inform the audience about what is happening. Matt Damon is the perfect choice to play Watney. Watney's character and his being stranded alone on Mars reminded me of the movie, Cast Away, with Tom Hanks. Both movies concentrate on one character alone trying to survive while cut off from the world. In both cases, this person is an everyman who the audiences like and can identify with.

The director of The Martian is Ridley Scott, who is one of my favorites.  He has directed several Science Fiction films and he likes to have strong female characters. Previously, he directed Alien, Blade Runner, and Thelma & Louise. In The Martian,  two of the astronaut crew are women including the commander of the mission played by Jessica Chastain. In real life two female NASA astronauts have been commanders of the International Space Station. And The Martian does pass the Bechdel test. We have two female characters discussing making a bomb among other things. There was very little romance in the book and what there was has been mostly cut out of the movie. Scott does a very good job of creating a believable picture of living on Mars (which was actually filmed in Jordan).  On the whole, this is a very enjoyable movie that, like Gravity, makes an effort to do the science right.  There are a few things that are wrong scientifically. The storm on Mars in the first scene would not have been able to blow Watney away because the air on Mars is too thin, and the sunsets should have been blue not red. The most unbelievable physics in The Martian is the "iron-man" rescue scene at the end. It reminded me of the scene in WALL-E with the fire extinguisher and is about as realistic.

There are a few funny scenes in The Martian for geeks like me. I laughed out loud at the discussion of Project Elrond and there is a nice reference to Apollo 13 in calling Rich Purnell a steely eyed missile man.  And then, Watney's line, “I'm going to have to science the shit out of this" will be the new meme for all of us geeks. I need to get a t-shirt! I liked The Martian a lot.