By: Declan Hertel Entertainment Editor
With the recent discovery of liquid water on Mars, the Red Planet seems closer than ever.
This seemingly simple but massively important discovery got me all fired up to see “The Martian,” the latest film from Ridley Scott whose other works include “Alien,” and “Blade Runner.”
A new movie about Mars comes out just as we make a huge breakthrough in its exploration? It’s hard to believe it wasn’t planned.
“The Martian” finds Matt Damon (“The Bourne Identity”) playing Mark Watney, an astronaut accidentally left for dead on the surface of Mars after a storm prematurely ends the crew’s mission. As he begins to create a one-man colony on the surface, NASA realizes he’s alive and sets about bringing him home.
I went into this movie expecting something like Alfonso Cuarón’s “Gravity” (2013), where a single astronaut is stranded in space and everything’s falling apart around the crew and “oh god, oh god” the empty vastness is so near “oh god.”
While there are moments of great tension (and what else could we expect from the man who made freaking “Alien”), they don’t overwhelm. Instead, the brilliance of “The Martian” lies in its bright tone: while it’s always clear that the situation is dire and time is limited, the film just asks you to accept that and instead chooses to focus on just how supremely cool this whole thing is.
Watney is always cracking jokes to his video journal and talking about how awesome it is that he’s triumphing over a barren wasteland where it would only take one big mistake to kill him. He talks about technical definitions of colonization and what international laws space falls under, always to bring it back to “Everything I do has never been done before. That is ‘NUTS’.”
Watching Watney’s new home come together is a joy; we celebrate with every success and lament every failure with him. For a movie about a fairly hopeless situation, the film is very funny and lighthearted.
“The Martian” also features a spectacular ensemble cast to complement Damon, with the likes of Jessica Chastain (“Zero Dark Thirty”), Chiwetel Ejiofor (“12 Years a Slave”), and Sean Bean (“Game of Thrones”) making appearances. There is not a weak performance among the cast, each approaching the tasks ahead of them with the gravity they’re due, but also with that sense of “this is so cool.”
Movies that center around the “triumph of the human spirit” can very easily fall into superficial sentimentality that ends up dehumanizing the characters and cheapening the message, but not so with “The Martian.”
The dedication, enthusiasm, and sense of humor displayed by every character doesn’t feel forced. It feels like the natural reaction to a situation that’s totally unprecedented in terms of both danger and awesomeness.
In fact, that’s my takeaway from the movie: awesome. Humans are awesome, space is awesome, and the former can do awesome things in the latter despite great obstacles. Because we’re humans. We can tame space. And that’s awesome.
