[This post contains some spoilers.]The latest in a trio of block-busting space epics, Ridley Scott's new film, The Martian, rides a wave of space-hype started by Alfonso Cuarón's Gravity and Christopher Nolan's Interstellar. Combined with the ballooning attention toward the actual red planet, the story of astronaut Mark Watney's (Matt Damon) abandonment and struggle for survival in hostile alien territory is an obvious draw for science geeks, futurists, and NASA fanboys who spend a lot of time thinking about how to gtfo of Earth.
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Naturally, the film is already running the traditional sci-fi gauntlet of critics questioning both its artistic value and scientific accuracy. Andy Weir, the author of the novel The Martian is based on, put most of his focus into the science aspect of the story. "No one would ever accuse The Martian of being literature," he tells The Creators Project.There are none of Cuarón's allusions to evolution or the womb, or Nolan's conjecture about interdimensional aliens. "It's not deep," Weir continues. "The characters undergo almost no change throughout the course of the story. They have the same outlook in the end as the beginning. And I'm completely unapologetic about that, by the way."
What he says about character development is true. The members of Watney's crew can be concisely summarized as a guilt-ridden commanding officer (Jessica Chastain), a family man (Aksel Hennie), two hurried romantics (Kate Mara, Sebastian Stan), and a Catholic (Michael Peña). On Earth most of the drama takes place between a curmudgeonly bureaucrat (Jeff Daniels) and an idealistic scientist (Chiwetel Ejiofor). Even Watney is a bit one-dimensional—which Weir admits with ease. "Mark is pretty much my own personality," he says. "We're both smartasses. But he's better than me at almost everything he does, and he doesn't have my flaws."On top of that, the only moral lessons learned from the whole narrative are: 1) don't get marooned on Mars, and 2) if you do, be highly trained in chemistry, life sciences, mechanics, computer science, and any other specializations you can think of. By the end of the movie, everything is back to normal, except that Matt Damon has some interplanetary ghost stories to tell his wide-eyed new college students.
But while reading the book or sitting in a movie theater, you find yourself constantly wondering how Watney will escape crisis after crisis. None of that other stuff matters as much as watching him "Science the shit out of" the ridculously complex—yet expertly explained—debacles Weir describes. Like a strange fusion of Weir's main influences, Apollo 13 and Cast Away, The Martian delivers a thrilling, age old story of man vs. nature with a sci-fi backdrop.For Weir, developing the understandable explanations of scientific concepts, spooky alien atmosphere, and seriously cool toys became trials and tribulations in their own right. Watney's process of breaking down each problem into bite-sized parts is an echo of Weir's own, albeit more gleeful and less deadly, creative process. That's what's for sale here: interesting problems, solved interestingly. As Weir puts it, "This is not a character story. All I ever want is to entertain the reader. I hate when stories preach at me, so I don't preach at my readers. This is a plot-driven story."
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