If it’s the goal of great science fiction to boldly go where no man has gone before, an entry-level problem for The Martian is that it seems to be planting its space boots in some very recently trodden turf.
For Matt Damon, the whole movie is another lost in space pick-up attempt, after his similar part in Interstellar. For Ridley Scott it’s another disaster-strewn voyage into the cosmos, after his own return to the genre withPrometheus. Is this a new frontier to explore, or just a disco remix?
The difference from both of those movies is ambition (lower) and tone (much, much lighter). Adapting the self-published novel by Andy Weir, Scott and his screenwriter, Lost and Cabin in the Woods scribe Drew Goddard, get the premise speedily up and running: a manned mission to Mars, with six astronauts tasked with bringing back samples, is thrown into disarray when heavy weather blows in.
One of their number, botanist Mark Watney (Damon), is hit by flying debris and thrown out of sight; his communications and life signs both go dead; and the other five, played by Jessica Chastain, Kate Mara, Sebastian Stan, Aksel Hennie and Michael Peña, have no choice but to abort their mission and head back to Earth.
“I’m not dead,” the injured Mark reports on regaining consciousness, in a first recorded missive which he has no means to convey to Nasa. “Obviously.” That’s a very Goddard “obviously” – you hear his smart, wisecracking voice constantly scanning the joint for comic potential.
The Martian touches on the melancholy of Mark’s predicament, stuck on the red planet with any hope of rescue several years away, and having to figure out a long-term survival plan that involves planting potatoes and using poo for fertiliser. But Scott and Goddard mainly want to be funny about all this, as if they’d sat through Interstellar flashing each other knowing looks about how self-serious its ideas all were.
Funny this one duly is, thanks in large part to Damon’s ruefully engaging solo showmanship. Ironically, given that Mark’s sending all his winking messages into a void, communication is Damon’s genius: he’s built up such a strong relationship with audiences over the years that we know exactly how to read him for an impending burst of irony or a fit of pique, milliseconds before it comes on. And he’s great at fatigue, and indulging himself with childish strops, and holding back emotion when there’s practical MacGyvering to be done, which is for months on end.
Back on Earth, Nasa finally spot signs of life, and rig up a makeshift way to message Mark using some crusty old satellite they bring out of the back cupboard. Organising his safe return, though, is an epic, epic, business: it involves Jeff Daniels, Chiwetel Ejiofor, hexadecimal coding, Kristen Wiig, “classified booster technology”, Sean Bean, the Chinese, a reference to Tolkien’s council of Elrond, rising star Donald Glover (who’s particularly charming), Mackenzie Davis, and roughly a year of planning, sardonic banter and intense bursts of Goddard geek talk.
It takes a loooong time to cobble any semblance of a plan together – stretching the film’s sturdy but basic bring-him-home plot well over the two-hour mark, and debatably outstaying its welcome in a worryingly low-urgency middle third.
Compared with the heaving verbosity of other recent Scott pictures (Exodus, say), all the chatter here feels better matched with his obsessions, at least: it’s a film about micromanaging, fixing things on the fly, and a lot of Ridley’s gruff, technocrat personality shines through.
If this makes the movie chummier than it is truly nail-biting – the lack of any identifiable villain costs it something in terms of conflict – so be it. Crowd-pleasing Scott is actually rare Scott these days – even when forced riffs about the Chastain character’s relentless love of disco become a kind of infinite-repeat purgatory of their own.
When Damon patches up a cracked helmet with gaffer tape, or jerry-rigs his solution to heating problems, or even runs out of ketchup, you can sense Scott loving the intersection between hi-tech and low-brow: as Mark says in practically a mission statement, “I’m going to have to science the s— out of this.”
On a good day, Ron Howard might have made the movie – it often resembles a rewrite of Apollo 13 by the quippiest science geek in class. And you’d hardly call it Scott stretching himself, or the boundaries of where an effects blockbuster can take us. It’s less a space odyssey than this genre’s equivalent of a high-climbing log flume.
source:telegraph