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“The Martian” Is Thrilling, Surprisingly Funny, and Scientifically Accurate
The Martian features Matt Damon as NASA astronaut Mark Watney, who with a six-member crew including commanding officer Jessica Chastain, is on a month-long science mission on the beautifully desolate surface of Mars. Of course, one month is only the planned duration of their stay on the surface; the deep space transit to and from Mars takes several hundred days each way, which becomes important later in the film.
We enter the story partway into the surface mission. The crew is collecting Martian soil samples when NASA sends them an urgent message about an impending storm. The storm is apparently so severe that the rocket which is supposed to lift the crew back into space at the end of their mission won’t survive the harsh winds on the ground. So the crew is forced to abort their surface mission and perform a hasty emergency launch. In the rush and confusion, Watney is left behind, presumed dead. All of this introductory material is completed in a very breezy few minutes, plunging us right into the survival story.
Damon is charming, self-deprecating, full of creativity, and despite the all the rational reasons to believe himself doomed, he remains confident in his training and problem-solving abilities. He shows well-earned pride of accomplishment and just the kind of cockiness you’d expect from a flyboy as he conquers the litany of challenges thrown at him by the deserted red planet, including lack of breathing air, food shortages, transportation, weather, and communication. However, the film seems to gloss over his coming-to-grips with his extremely perilous situation. Instead, it jumps ahead several weeks, thereby depriving us of the opportunity to watch Damon experience the full range of emotions you’d expect from a marooned spaceman, including grief, denial, anger, resentment, loneliness, despair, and hopelessness — especially in light of the events that stranded him there. We see a lot of footage of Damon entertaining himself by making smart remarks into a camera, and he is often hilarious. But there is little sense that he feels alone or lonely at all (in contrast with, say, Sam Rockwell’s performance in Moon), which reduces the euphoria we should feel when he finally re-establishes communication with NASA. Perhaps it is this unworldly optimism that helped keep him alive.
The Martian has a lot in common with Apollo 13, the film that set the standard in the genre. The story alternates between scenes of the stranded Damon, the rest of his crew in long transit back to Earth, the NASA leadership (featuring a strong tension between the political appointee Jeff Daniels and the canny flight director Sean Bean, with some comic relief from PR head Kristen Wiig), and the crack teams of mostly faceless Jet Propulsion Lab engineers on the ground, pulling out all the stops to keep their man alive and put together a rescue plan, while sending up improvised plans and instructions to Watney so he can stretch his equipment far beyond its design limits.
I wish we could see more of Bean with his more sentimental approach to the problem, and his personal concern for the crew’s autonomy and right to be informed. After a while, Daniels’ executive style of snap decision-making seems just a way to move the plot forward.
Benedict Wong plays the JPL lead engineer, quite effectively portraying the burden every leader feels as he commits his team to meet the unrealistically short production schedule without compromising technical performance of a resupply craft — this time with an elevated purpose, because Watney’s life is on the line. He gives the sense that he is honored to accept the challenge before him, making him one of my favorite characters.
In contrast with Apollo 13, the focus is almost exclusively on the aforementioned people who are working the problem, and we see only a few short glimpses of anyone’s families. This doesn’t detract from the character development or the audience’s attachment to them, though, because there are several endearing scenes portraying the crew-as-family. Michael Peña in particular has a youthful optimism that somehow induces you to cheer for him as an underdog despite his being an extremely skilled astronaut and spacecraft pilot. And in fact, the “family of the crew” is used as part of a very satisfying plot twist.
There are two particularly relatable and inspiring characters. Mackenzie Davis portrays Mindy Park, a young female engineer whose job is to analyze Martian surface imagery for the planning of future missions. After making a discovery that confounds her superiors, she doesn’t let their alpha-male personalities steamroll her. She overcomes their skepticism by walking them through her data, after which she earns their respect and becomes an important member of the recovery team.
The second is the scatterbrained young aerospace engineer Rich Purnell, played by Donald Glover. True to the stereotype, he has below-average communication skills and easily gets lost in his work. He has a bolt of inspiration and works out, all on his own, an unorthodox plan to execute a rescue mission that just might fit within their ever-shrinking window of opportunity. Oblivious to protocol or rank, he barges into the office of a higher-up whom he’s never met, demands that he hang up the phone, and explains his plan. Then he stages a goofy and highly entertaining demonstration in a conference room, using Daniels and Wiig as human props to illustrate his proposed orbital maneuvers with a flying stapler. Purnell later receives a high compliment that will put a smile on the face of anyone familiar with the (link contains minor spoiler) hotshot jargon of the Apollo era.
From start to finish, the science and engineering of the movie is of a very high quality. It has just the right balance of technical jargon and explanatory dialogue, so it’s neither inaccessible nor tedious. The crew convincingly discusses astronautical concepts like orbital rendezvous, gravity assist, and delta-V, while Damon demonstrates some impressive agronomy, inorganic chemistry, and electro-mechanical know-how down on the surface. There were a few times when my engineer’s ears perked up upon hearing a quantity expressed in the wrong units, for example, but it wasn’t enough to ruin my typically fragile suspension of disbelief.
In terms of the plot, it’s a straightforward survival-and-rescue movie, although heavy on engineering rather than backwoods techniques, with only a few unexpected twists and turns. The launch sequences and space rendezvous scenes are gripping and sometimes breathtaking. One of the twists, in my opinion, is poorly executed because it’s too telegraphed, but you can be the judge.
The space scenes seem to have used true zero-gravity filming techniques such as the Vomit Comet, with nifty transitions to 1-g as the astronauts “descend” the ladders out to the rim of the spinning section of their interplanetary craft. At the very beginning of the movie there seems to have been an effort to portray the lower Martian gravity (1/3 of Earth’s) in the way Damon walks in his spacesuit, but after a while you stop noticing, or they stopped trying to portray it. Either way it’s just a nit.
The Martian runs a fast 141 minutes, with no lulls or slow sequences that I can remember. It’s a fantastic aerospace showcase that couldn’t have had better timing with its release to theaters, given real-world events.
Update: See also anonymous’s review of the original book from last year.
Published in Culture, Science & Technology
Mark, I enjoyed the movie. The movie would have ben 10 hours long if it had stuck to the book. I re-read the book recently and there were places where other problems were encountered that the movie skipped over. I was waiting for problems that didn’t happen. That would be an unfair criticism of the movie.
SPOILER: I did think that the Watnet’s emotional moment before being launched from the lunar surface was well done.
Thanks. Just bought the book-paperback so I can pass it around the family.
I agree, that was probably the most poignant moment of the movie. It’s a confusing swirl of emotions: Why was I stranded here? How did I get this far? Now I have to say goodbye. But finally I’m going home.
Saw the movie last night and really enjoyed it (had also read the book about a year ago).
Great review and great discussion. Let’s reconvene next week for “Steve Jobs”.
Yeah, I would prefer Sandra Bullock in her underwear.
But, wait, isn’t the Martian our Dear President, rescuing an ungrateful world from humans who cling to their guns and religion?
No, not those humans in Isis. Those humans in America.
Fortunately, there is a sign of water on Mars.
Saw it last night. I’m not a scientist, but some of the uses of tarps and duct tape did seem far-fetched to me. Other stuff too. Still, I did suspend my skepticism to enjoy the movie. I wish there had been more emotional punch, however. More angst would have made the can-do creativity more impressive and meaningful.
I guess you’re not the only one who assumed it was common duct tape, but since we’re talking about NASA it’s much more likely to be a very expensive, high-grade metallic or fiber composite tape and an advanced polymer tarp. I did a little back of the envelope calculation on this to show that sealing the Hab as he did is at least plausible. And using it to seal cracks in his helmet is a gimme — the force exerted by the pressurized gas passing through a small crack is very light compared to the strength of the tape and the adhesion.
I based the pressure on the oxygen % readings in the vicinity of 20%. That suggests that pressure must be close to 1 atm. Either way, it’s bad science on the part of the movie.
Countering my error in use of D, I lowballed the number and used ID instead of OD. As the tarp was wrapped arround the OD of the airlock fitting, that diameter is relevant. Even using the lowballed 6 foot diameter, that would have a load of about 2000 ksi.
Would a boron nitride nanotube tarp look exactly like a cheap poly painters tarp?
No, the difference between the ID and the OD is negligible compared to the factor of 4 error caused by using diameter instead of radius. You’re assuming the O2 display was meant to peg the pressure at 1 atm as official canon, and then using that to prove other errors. I would argue that 1 atm is a ridiculous pressure for the Hab, and that is the error. It should be a lower pressure with higher O2 content. It’s probably the work of some set designer who looked up the O2 percentage of Earth’s atmosphere on Wikipedia and didn’t know any better.
You might as well argue the whole movie is fake because humans can’t fly to Mars, the radiation dose would be too great. I guess they should’ve scrapped the whole project.
After all, the ion engine in the Hermes is way bigger than any ion engine that’s ever been built. So we know that’s impossible too.
Now you are getting lost in the weeds. I brought up boron nitride as an example of a tape material that has a strength in the relevant range. It’s science-fiction. The relevant question is not whether present-day tarp and tape technology meets the requirements, it’s whether such strong tarp and tape could be invented.
When I say scientifically accurate, I mean the movie does not, in general, violate known laws or facts of physics (apart from the increased atmospheric density in order to make the storm wind dangerous, an intentional fib acknowledged by the author), and that the technology shown in the movie could plausibly be invented. Not that every single fact is perfect all the way down to the numbers shown on the just-for-looks computer displays, and we shouldn’t care whether the color and texture of a high-strength tarp is sufficiently different from the color and texture of a painter’s tarp. Come on now.
We agree on this one.
So why fixate on this as proof that the Hab pressure is 1 atm?
Because that is the number they gave.
Wow, humans apparently only needed a few hours on that planet’s surface to destroy the climate and cause massive storms. Will we ever learn?
I meant Martian surface. Ooops
Funny, I didn’t even notice that error, Frank.