Film Review:
In the near future, humanity has begun sending people to Mars. Everything goes swimmingly until, on the third mission, a storm threatens to kill the crew. In the rush to evacuate the red planet, Mark Watney (Matt Damon) is impaled by a satellite and, presumed dead, is left behind.
Ridley Scott’s The Martian is a tense, funny, and incredibly well-directed work paying immense respect to its original source material.
The film takes place equal parts on Mars and off, with strong performances from Jeff Daniels as the NASA administrator and Donald Glover as an appropriately unhinged aeronautics engineer, both of whom come into play when it becomes clear Watney needs a way to get back home. It feels very grounded, with the near-future version of NASA still struggling for funding.
There’s also a great dynamic between the rest of Watney’s crew members, offering the kind of clever banter one might expect between a group of highly-intelligent astronauts. The real emotional moments of the film come from these interactions, and extra credit should go to Jessica Chastain for her role as Commander Lewis, the team’s leader. These characters all feel human, and though they do tend to fill the roles of archetypes they never fall into caricatures, an aspect carried over well from the original novel.
The Martian is a very tense movie, with every solution Watney “sciences” together leading to more issues for his increasingly bleak situation. Because of this, it’s also worth noting just how funny the film can be. Things go wrong constantly for the main character, but his constant self-dialoguing and video logging leads to numerous quips about “blowing himself up” or “being the universe’s first space pirate,” all delivered expertly by Damon. This is thanks in part to Andy Weir’s writing, though screenplay writer Drew Goddard should also be commended for how skilfully the best moments of the book are transitioned to the big screen.
The film itself follows the book very closely, but where the written version of The Martian stumbles in its often slavish dedication to Watney’s scientific processes, told mostly through written logs, Scott takes advantage of a combination of devices to keep at a brisk pace. What results is something that will be accurate enough for the scientific crowd while still being a compelling and engaging experience, showing just as often as telling what’s happening.
All in all, The Martian is a brilliant film and is well worth one’s time and money this October. It’s a near-perfect retelling of the book’s plot, and an excellent example of the kinds of book-to-movie films Hollywood should be making.
