9 / 10
Official trailer
The Martian is the rare mainstream science fiction film that treats its science as the point instead of as decoration.
Ridley Scott directed. Drew Goddard adapted Andy Weir’s 2011 novel. Matt Damon plays Mark Watney, an astronaut accidentally left behind on Mars when his crew evacuates during a sandstorm and assumes he’s dead. The plot is the year Watney spends figuring out how to survive on Mars while NASA, the Chinese National Space Administration, and his returning crewmates figure out how to rescue him.
Jessica Chastain plays Commander Melissa Lewis. Jeff Daniels plays NASA director Teddy Sanders. Chiwetel Ejiofor plays Mars mission director Vincent Kapoor. Sean Bean plays Mitch Henderson. Donald Glover plays Rich Purnell, the orbital dynamics expert who figures out the rescue trajectory. Kristen Wiig plays the NASA press secretary.
Watching a smart man swear at a problem and then solve it with chemistry is about as happy as a movie makes me. I’m a sucker for any story that treats competence as heroic, and this one does it for two hours without a wasted scene. If I have a complaint, it’s that I’d have happily taken another half hour of Watney alone.
The film made approximately six hundred and thirty million dollars worldwide on a one hundred and eight million dollar budget. It was among the most commercially successful hard science fiction films ever made. The reviews were uniformly positive.
The film received seven Academy Award nominations. Andy Weir’s novel had also been a commercial success, originally self-published before Crown Publishing picked it up. The film is the rare adaptation that improved on its source by tightening the structure and accelerating the pace.
The Problem-Solving Premise
Structurally, the film is a series of problems that Watney has to solve to survive. He needs to grow food. He uses Martian soil mixed with his own waste to produce potatoes. He needs more water. He extracts hydrogen from rocket fuel and burns it with oxygen to produce water, while almost killing himself in a hydrogen explosion. He needs to communicate. He finds the abandoned Pathfinder probe from 1997 and reactivates it to send messages to Earth. Each problem produces a scientific solution. Each solution produces new problems.
The structure is what fans of hard science fiction have wanted from mainstream cinema for decades.
Most science fiction films treat the science as the obstacle to be removed before the story can begin. The Martian treats the science as the story. Watney’s competence is the entire engine. The audience watches a person think their way out of certain death using only the materials available. The pleasure is in the problem-solving instead of in the action.
The hydrogen scene is the one I’d point to. Watney nearly blows himself up making water, and the tension comes entirely from the chemistry going wrong. Not many films can make me sweat over a chemical reaction, and this one does it more than once.
For Writers
Competence is a badly underused engine in fiction. The Martian is structured around a protagonist who’s competent and uses that competence to solve real problems. The audience invests because problem-solving is inherently satisfying when the problems are real. The lesson is that competence porn, derided in some literary circles, is a legitimate narrative engine. Show a character who knows what they’re doing using that knowledge to solve specific problems. Readers will follow that character indefinitely.
Matt Damon
Damon was forty-four during filming. The role required him to carry significant portions of the film alone. Mars is empty. There are no other actors to play off. Watney addresses the camera directly through a video log he maintains throughout his time on the surface. The performance requires Damon to be entertaining alone on screen for major sections of the runtime. He commits to the work.
The performance is tuned for warmth and detail. Watney is a botanist with a sense of humor that his situation hasn’t entirely crushed. He swears at NASA. He plays disco music his commander left behind because she preferred 1970s soul, which Watney hates. He documents his attempts to solve impossible problems with the dryness of a person who has accepted that he might die at any moment. The dryness keeps the film from becoming melodrama. The audience laughs with Watney instead of for him.
Damon carries the whole picture, and I can’t imagine anybody else making Watney this easy to spend two hours with. The grumbling about the disco kills me, and the dry video-log jokes are exactly why I never felt the film sliding into a weepie.
For Writers
A solitary protagonist needs a distinct voice that can sustain extended monologue. The Martian’s Watney addresses a video log. The voice is dry, specific, and recognizably human. The audience follows him because the voice is interesting. The lesson is that isolated characters in fiction require unusually strong narration. The voice has to do what dialogue with other characters would normally do. Develop the voice before isolating the character. The character is the voice when no one else is on screen.
The Earth Sequences
The story alternates between Watney’s struggle on Mars and the Earth-side effort to rescue him.
The NASA sequences are populated with strong character actors playing competent professionals trying to solve a problem that’s partly engineering and partly political. The scenes are some of the most realistic depictions of how NASA works that mainstream cinema has produced. The institutional dynamics are credible. The political pressures are credible. The technical conversations are reasonably accurate.
The Donald Glover sequence, in which Rich Purnell figures out the gravitational slingshot trajectory that becomes the rescue plan, is the film’s most-quoted Earth scene.
Glover plays Purnell as a barely-functional genius who has just realized something important and can’t articulate it without using a stapler and a paperclip to show the orbital mechanics. The sequence captures the energy of scientists working at the edge of what they know. The performance is the film’s best supporting role.
Glover’s scene is my favorite in the film. The stapler demonstration is funny and exciting at once, and I’d watch a whole movie about Rich Purnell.
For Writers
Scientific discovery in fiction works when the writer treats the scientists as recognizable humans with specific work habits. The Martian’s NASA scientists are awkward, competent, and visibly working. The audience reads them as real because they behave like real scientists. The lesson is that researching the actual culture of your fictional professionals produces material the writer couldn’t have invented. Real scientists don’t talk like science fiction scientists. Real engineers don’t work like science fiction engineers. Use the real cultures. The fiction will benefit.
Craft Note
The potato-farming sequence is the film’s central craft. Ridley Scott stages Watney’s first agricultural success through procedural exposition (the soil chemistry, the water generation, the planting) without sacrificing dramatic momentum. Science fiction can make scientific process dramatic when the protagonist’s actual survival depends on the procedure working.
Is The Martian as good as people say?
9/10. This is the mainstream science fiction film I’d hand to anyone who says the genre has gone stupid. Damon owns it, the Earth sequences are full of strong character work, and the problem-solving structure kept me hooked from the potatoes to the rescue. The film treats its audience as intelligent, and the audience responded by making it a hit. It’s a 9 because I enjoyed nearly every minute and finished it wanting to go back to Mars with him. Watch it.
