Directing is more than choosing expressive shots and coaxing emotionally satisfying performances from actors. I worked with a director who likened the job to being a general. For any strong director (one who’s no mere hired hand), the shaping of the story, the casting, the creation and approval of sets and props, the details of costume and makeup, the sound design—in short, the movie’s over-all tone and style sense—are the director’s indirect handiwork. That’s exactly how Ridley Scott exercises his authority on “The Martian.” Scott, who’s in his seventies, puts on a virtuoso display of cinematic professionalism, aligning all the movie’s elements—visual and sonic, dramatic and thematic, human and material—to move ahead briskly and compactly, with the seeming unity of one meticulously designed and properly functioning machine.
The film is so consistent in its storytelling and coherent in its details, magnetically aligned according to the ideas and tastes of one person, that it breezes gloriously past some of its biggest and best questions. Of course, questions aren’t action or suspense but merely motives for the artist, prods for creation; filmmakers craft their work on the basis of the questions they choose to address—and the ones they ignore. Scott’s ideas and his skills mesh so happily that they sent this viewer nearly bouncing out into the street, propelled by a blast of cinematic pleasure that soon dissipated and left a hollow so big as to nearly swallow up the entire viewing experience.
The story of “The Martian,” as everyone knows by now, based on the novel by Andy Weir, involves a mission to Mars that goes wrong: the half-dozen American astronauts jovially collecting samples of Martian soil to bring back to Earth find themselves confronted with a storm of deadly intensity and are forced to abort their mission. As they prepare to head home in a big hurry, one of their number, Mark Watney (Matt Damon), is struck by flying debris, his space suit damaged. Soon he’s gone with the wind, and the crew, clambering into their vehicle, leaves him for dead and lifts off.
But Mark isn’t dead; he’s merely knocked out and wounded, and when he awakens, he quickly dusts off his ventilator, starts breathing freely, and discovers that the hole in his suit—caused by an arrow-like piece of antenna—has been sealed with his own dried blood. He does have a puncture wound in his stomach; he repairs to the atmosphere-controlled base to tend to his injury, and—realizing that he’s alone on Mars—thinks out, methodically and energetically, in the days and weeks that follow, the measures needed for him to survive, to make contact with NASA on Earth, and to prepare for his rescue.
From the start, Mars looks good. The red planet seems just red enough, its soil a light off-brown that’s perfectly placed on the swatch chart between the familiar and the exotic. The white surfaces of spacecraft are neither high-gloss nor full matte; their colorful highlights are decorative and not gaudy; the space suits appear practical, and the equipment seems machined for use, not futuristically extravagant. “The Martian” is a well-decorated film that shows off a design consistent with function rather than with pleasure; its modest but meticulous plausibility hits an intellectual sweet spot.
Yet the intensely practical focus of action doesn’t foreclose wonder. Scott sees the very fact of space travel, the sheer ingenuity of engineering and the missions that it enables, as beautiful and awe-inspiring. Mark’s daily life on Mars is tinged with wide-eyed astonishment at the extraordinary details of ordinary life under extraordinary conditions. The same feeling infuses the lives of the scientists, the colleagues flying home in a mighty craft built of tubes and tori.
That’s where the best thing in the movie happens: the way that the five astronauts onboard move around. In the weightless environment, they seem to swim through air, grabbing rungs to propel themselves quickly through corridors, dropping gracefully like divers through water, slipping sharply around corners like tadpoles. An avant-garde edit of the film would feature nothing but astronauts in motion, like an interplanetary ballet.
But the movie’s aesthetic byways are tethered to the core of the action, which is science and its characters’ mastery of it. Mark is a botanist—but one who just happens to know how to perform surgery on himself with no (or perhaps minimal) anesthetic, not just pulling the sharpened antenna from his stomach but digging around in the hole with forceps to extract a bullet-like metal plug, stapling himself shut, and remaining healthy afterwards, with no threat of infection. His botanical skills enable him to figure out how to extend his food supply for the required duration (about four years)—namely, to plant vacuum-packed potatoes in Martian soil under a large sealed tent, fertilized with the crew’s desiccated feces, which have been sealed by the station’s sanitary system and which Mark irrigates with a remarkable contraption that he devises to generate water from its elements.
The movie’s central dramatic twists are all “aha” moments. Mark needs to get around on Mars and figures out how to tweak a golf-cart-like rover to go thousands of miles (that’s where the already-legendary line “I’m gonna have to science the shit out of this” is deployed). In one of the story’s most ingenious turns, Mark heads to the ruins of the defunct Pathfinder probe and turns it into his means of communicating with NASA on Earth. Scott handles the scene deftly, with his discovery being seen by a relatively low-level analyst named Mindy Park (Mackenzie Davis) on routine duty at her video station.
The dawning of knowledge, the instant of understanding, the way an idea comes together at once as if with the satisfying snap of a seat-belt buckle—such well-prepared serendipities are the mainsprings of “The Martian.” Yet Scott appears interested throughout in science, though not truly in scientists. For all the implicit humanism of a story about amazingly massive and expensive resources being deployed for the rescue of one person, the movie is ultimately impersonal—not accidentally impersonal, not impersonal by sheer narrative propulsion, but impersonal by a design that ultimately comes off as ideological.
The first surprise is that Mark’s inner life on Mars is virtually nonexistent. Mark delivers rather bland reflections into a camera for his video log. It’s unclear whether there’s more to it than the snippets offered in the movie, but, in any case, Scott isn’t interested in what Mark is going through emotionally or psychologically—or, for that matter, in who Mark is—but only in what Mark does.
Mark is working to survive, a virtual subsistence farmer of Mars who, beside planting and harvesting, beside figuring out how to communicate with Earth, seems nonetheless to have an awful lot of time on his hands. Isn’t there a book he’s been awaiting the spare time to read and that NASA could upload for him? A few new movies that are on streaming video? May we be spared the details, but unless there’s saltpeter in the soil, he may miss sex; is there someone back home with whom he’s in a relationship?
What’s it like for him to be alone for years? Is the sheer solitude a burden? Is the simple lack of human contact a cause of psychological derangement? Are there exercises that he does in order to ward off hallucinations, to control inner voices? And what are those voices? What does Mark say to himself? What does he think—or feel? Is there anything that he has to overcome in order to remain mentally sharp and emotionally stable?
What does he do all day while he’s alone on Mars? It’s a running joke that the only music he has on hand is from an iPod belonging to the mission’s leader, Commander Lewis (Jessica Chastain), that’s filled with first-generation disco. He listens to it every now and then. (What would he prefer? He doesn’t say.) There are no movies, no books, no crossword puzzles or solitaire or chess or Brick Breaker on any of his computers; he isn’t shown making a deck of cards for himself or teaching himself to draw or writing down his dreams or penning imaginary letters to those back home.
Those back home: who are they? Amazingly, when Mark makes contact with NASA, he makes no contact with family or friends; he comes off as a perfect scientific monad, a highly functional loner in space whose sole connections are to his colleagues on the Mars adventure and those in NASA’s mission-control station.
Scott’s rationalism filters out all personal characteristics—and all traces of identity. In one key moment, Mark needs to make a small fire—and the only combustible material on hand is a small wooden crucifix that one of his cohorts, Martinez (Michael Peña) left behind, and he burns it. It’s only when the science of the rescue mission is all done and what remains depends purely on human execution, beyond the reach of mission control, that one scientist turns to an engineer named Vincent Kapoor (played by Chiwetel Ejiofor), and asks whether he believes in God. Vincent answers, “My father was Hindu, my mother was Baptist, so I believe in something.” Here, faith is the equivalent of crossing one’s fingers and hoping for the best—only after one has done everything that one can do.
The cast of “The Martian” is a model of cinematic diversity, yet Scott’s idea of diversity is visual, not substantial. Scott gets around the matter of character by way of characters. He collects an engaging array of actors whose external traits—gender, skin color, accent, body type, attire, posture, tone of voice—seem to suggest a great deal more about them than the movie itself, than Scott himself, has any interest in. (Yesterday, Scott was criticized by the Media Action Network for Asian-Americans, for changing the ethnicity of Kapoor, called Venkat in Weir’s novel and self-identifying solely as Hindu, and of Park, described by Weir as Korean-American, to white.) Scott is interested solely in the characters’ function in relation to the success of the mission to rescue Mark. His characters are free of history and devoid of intimate crises; their identity isn’t celebrated or even acknowledged in any substantial way, it’s filtered out. Scott delivers a vision of a pure and impersonal scientific meritocracy, and he envisions science and its locked-in binary implacability (leading to the ultimate binary opposition—life or death) as a model for societal integration.
His characters just do it; the movie’s key scientific lightbulb moment is delivered by a young, brilliant mathematician (Donald Glover) with cool slacker-hipster manners and distracted people skills. The chief engineer, Bruce Ng (Benedict Wong), is messy and somewhat uncommunicative, but he can meet the schedule. And, of course, from the perspective of the success or failure of the mission to rescue Mark, nothing matters except the technical skills to conceive it and to execute it. But those skills belong to people, with ideas and habits of mind, passions and emotional burdens, inclinations and aversions, fears and desires, which don’t vanish when the subject turns to science.
Scott seems to be offering a sort of advertisement for technical achievement as a model of human achievement, but it’s one in which the human factor is left out. His seeming obliviousness to purpose and ideas comes to the fore in scenes involving scientists in China, working for the official aerospace program; Weir’s novel prominently features the contributions of the Chinese agency, but, as blandly filmed by Scott, without context or conflict, those scenes play as if he had shot them in the hope of achieving distribution there—as if they should have disclaimer titles scrolling along the bottom to declare them paid political advertising.
The relentless focus on technical achievement, in the absence of the complexity of the characters—in the absence of cultural identities and emotional connections, backstories and ambitions, the drive of will and ideological commitment, of fantasy and distraction—is the very antithesis of artistic creation. The first remarkable, impersonal technical achievement that Scott seems to be celebrating is his own.
