Andy Weir’s novel begins:
I’m pretty much fucked.
That’s my considered opinion.
Fucked.
Early on, the movie adaptation drops the F-bomb twice, which is the maximum allowed for a PG-13 film, given there’s not much violence or nudity. Through the use of clever cutaways, the filmmakers manage to preserve the unfiltered character nicely. And no, these workarounds are not nearly as insulting as sanitizing the word with a perfectly timed gunshot, à la Live Free and Die Hard.
I’m glad, too. Mark Whatley (Matt Damon) is an endearing character whose cursing is integral to his personality. He’s the only human on Mars, stranded by a mission which went tits up. His diet, consisting mostly of microwaved potatoes, is in constant peril. Worst of all, he just ran out of ketchup. That he only says (and types) “fuck” a handful of times is kind of amazing, really.
The thing that struck me most about The Martian are the landscapes. None of it is obvious CGI and none of it looks like rose-filtered Earth locations, either. The horizons and the sun look just about right. Having just seen the trailer for Ron Howard’s In the Heart of the Sea, whose liberal use of bad CGI verges on obscene, I couldn’t believe my eyes. The Martian has some of the most subtle special effects I’ve ever seen. Every minute is visually believable.
The film wastes no time setting up the comradery among the martian astronauts, whose mission is jeopardized by a freak storm. The commander (Jessica Chastain) makes the hard decision to return to Earth prematurely. Moments later, she has to make the even harder decision: leaving Whatley behind when he’s struck by a flying satellite dish. Everyone believes he’s dead because the component which relays his life signs to the ship has been impaled by shrapnel.
Cleverly, the film trades first person narration for the video diaries Whatley keeps to entertain himself, which involve ransacking his coworkers’ personal effects and making fun of the things he finds. He tells the GoPro cameras stationed around the habitat what he’s up to every step of the way. The first order of business is setting up a crop a of potatoes. Then he’ll have to “science the shit out of the situation” in order to send an SOS back home. In his first message, he says in a comically weak voice, “Surprise.”
Unfortunately, Murphy’s Law is in full effect on Mars. You always know something is about to go wrong, but you never know what or how. It’s the same kind of suspense which made Apollo 13 so tense even though we all knew the characters make it back home. Like that movie, The Martian doesn’t try too to make its audience teary-eyed. It’s primary mission is to entertain, which is exactly what elevates it above the endless supply of movie directors trying to mimic 2001: A Space Odyssey by infusing artificial mysticism into their space films (see: the incredibly insulting Mission to Mars and the merely okay Red Planet).
The Martian has everything I wanted from Gravity and Interstellar. This is real science fiction and not the Hollywood bastardization of the genre. Sure, a few of the things that happen are unlikely (Weir said he wishes he had chosen a different disaster to kick off the story as a storm of that nature is unlikely on the red planet), but there are plenty of scenes which contain more science than all the previous martian movies combined.
This is all to say The Marian is easily the best science fiction movie of the 21st century. It’s no wonder why the NASA program is promoting it like their version of Top Gun, which was a boon to the Navy’s recruitment efforts. The PG-13 rating is wise because there will be countless children pursuing careers in science and aeronautics after seeing it. We need more movies like it—exactly like it. In fact, Hollywood should just go ahead and commit to adapting every novel Andrew Weir ever publishes from here on out.
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