When astronaut/botanist extraordinaire Mark Watney (Matt Damon) accidently gets left behind by his crew, he doesn’t sit and wallow in his predicament. He springs right into action, removing part of an antenna that has pierced his side in the mayhem with a pair of pliers, and immediately sorts through the remaining rations, calculating exactly how much food he has and how long it will last him.
When he doesn’t have enough, he figures out how to grow Martian potatoes in the crew’s leftover Martian habitat (the “Hab”) by burning Hydrazine to make water. Eventually, he’s able to find a rover buried in the Martian desert, which he uses to contact NASA.
“The Martian” is essentially two hours and 20 minutes of problem-solving with the central problem being: how can Watney keep himself alive while the good folks at NASA figure out a way to bring him home? But there’s no time to sit around and think pessimistic thoughts, not when there are taters to be grown. Math and science nerds will find much to love here; characters casually throw around scientific terms and complex mathematic formulas. The picture gets into the nitty-gritty details of how someone might actually survive on an alien planet for an extended period of time and what the rescue effort would look like.
All those fancy words and equations aside, “The Martian” can be distilled down to one simple phrase that even science novices can understand: Yay, science!
Weir wrote the book to be as scientifically accurate as possible, and that deep appreciation of real science (there are no teleportation devices or tractor beams to be found) can be strongly felt throughout the movie.
The movie also benefits from a talented, lively cast and Drew Goddard’s energetic screenplay, which is as full of witty one-liners as it is with science-speak. Damon is likable and charismatic as always, selling the action-movie survivalist side of Watney, as well as the scientist side. Watney is an action hero for science geeks: super-intelligent, able to improvise on the go (he seals up his helmet visor with duct tape) and also handsome and sassy.
The rest of the cast — Chiwetel Ejiofor, Jeff Daniels, Kristin Wiig and Sean Bean, as various NASA employees working diligently on Earth to bring Watney home — all look like they’re having a great time.
And perhaps everyone is having too great a time. “The Martian” is upbeat and positive to the point where there’s a noticeable lack of tension throughout. In sending people to space, there’s always going to be a huge sense of unpredictability. No matter how smart Watney is and how much training he may have received beforehand, being trapped on an alien planet (where there is no oxygen, among other challenges) with limited resources would be extremely dangerous and unpredictable, and yet, he acts as if he’s lived on Mars his entire life. The stakes don’t seem high enough; the major setbacks (the seal to the Hab breaking, destroying an entire crop of potatoes, NASA’s failed attempt to send an unmanned shipment of food) are few and far between.
Another problem, contributing to the lack of tension and unpredictability, is all the talking. Between Watney describing every task he does into his personal camera and the countless discussions at NASA, there’s too much talking. Everything is laid out in the utmost detail: Plot and character details are practically sounded out, while the major setbacks are very clearly telegraphed to the audience.
For all the complex math and science equations, “The Martian” is very straightforward — there’s not much room for ambiguity or interpretation, even at the end. The last scene basically reduces the essence of the movie down to one final, heavy-handed university lecture.
There are other issues: As strong as the supporting cast is, they’re not given a whole lot to do; most of the secondary characters register as thin and two-dimensional.
Ultimately, however, the movie didn’t stick with me as much as it should have.
(Rated PG-13 for some strong language, injury images and brief nudity.)