The Martian brings science, largely unchanged, from book to screen

Movie adaptations from books—especially beloved books—can be frightening things. Reading is a deeply personal act, where we take in words and build worlds inside of our minds where only we can experience them. Seeing a movie based on a book is almost like going on a blind date with someone you’ve known intimately through letters but never actually seen. That first meeting isn’t always a good one, because when beheld with your for-real eyes and ears, the person you see and hear isn’t necessarily going to be anything like the version of the person you thought you knew.

Fortunately, The Martian, is a good blind date. Screenwriter Drew Goddard has translated Andy Weir’s novel into a script that keeps almost all of the science and humor intact, and director Ridley Scott allows the vast emptiness of Mars to speak for itself, while keeping the gimmicks to a minimum.

And, of course, Matt Damon does wonders for the role of Mark Watney—the best botanist on the planet. The planet of Mars.

Credit: Giles Keyte, 20th Century Fox

Doing science, still alive

The Martian, for those not familiar, is a tale set in the not-too-distant future. It tells the story of astronaut Mark Watney, who is left stranded on Mars when his Ares 3 crewmates have to abort their month-long stay on the surface because of a severe storm. Watney is gravely injured in the evacuation and the other Ares crew, believing him dead, leave without him.

The primary fear Ars readers have expressed about the film is that it would screw up the very thing that made the book great: the mostly-plausible science. The meticulously researched problems that writer Andy Weir threw at Watney—and the creative, swear-word laced solutions to those problems—were what rocketed the book to legitimate best-seller status. And, of course, complex science problems that require a page or two of background often don’t translate at all to the big screen, where “show, don’t tell” is a major rule.

But the movie gets it right. Though truncated for time, most of the major scenes in the book are present and recognizable, with science intact. In order to stretch his food supply, Watney grows potatoes on Mars (and those are in fact real potatoes on screen, according to Matt Damon). To make water, Watney pulls hydrogen out of extra hydrazine fuel and burns it. His long rover trek to Schiaparelli Crater—a huge focus in the book’s third act—is mostly intact.

And, of course, Mark Watney is Mark Watney—the f-bomb dropping pirate-botanist king of Mars. Fears that Matt Damon lacked the charisma to pull off the role are completely unfounded, and he turns in a standout performance as an interplanetary Robinson Crusoe.

Credit: Courtesy 20th Century Fox

More alone than any human has ever been

By the end of the film—no spoilers, don’t worry—Watney has spent close to two years on Mars. Author Andy Weir—who was kind enough to talk to Ars at length last November and who also hung out with us at the movie’s world premiere in Toronto—previously explained to us that he wanted to write a science story, not a character study in crippling depression, and so he deliberately wrote Mark Watney as a resourceful fellow with an almost inhuman amount of optimism and resolve. Even when faced with repeated catastrophes and setbacks, book-Watney is always ready to sleep on a problem and then doggedly narrate his solution.

Director Ridley Scott chose to go in a slightly different way with the film. So much of the book relies on the audience having access to Watney’s internal monologue (because so much of the book is composed of Watney’s journal writings), and heavy narration in movies is a dramatic device that rarely works. So, we get to hear Watney’s thoughts via video logs that he keeps—but we also get to see Watney in a way that we can’t in the novel.

Scott paints Mars almost as a contemporary twin to the planetoid on which the Nostromo crew lands in his 1979 film Alien (the world is referred to as “LV-426” in Aliens, but it has no name in the first film). The orchestral musical cues subtly echo Jerry Goldsmith’s haunting score from that film, and Mars is shown in all its inhospitable vastness—often with that vastness juxtaposed against a very small and very insignificant Watney. Alien visual designer and Swiss surrealist H.R. Giger said in his Giger’s Alien art book that he thought of the planetoid in that movie as his own biomechanical world; Ridley Scott’s Mars is the sunlit antipode of that world, while still retaining a tremendous sense of indifference to the doings of humankind.

High flight

There’s much more going on in the film than just Watney stuck on Mars, of course, and even cast members who have few lines turn in solid performances. The rest of the Ares 3 crew—led by Jessica Chastain’s Commander Melissa Lewis—show off excellent space chops, and the scenes on the ground with NASA paint the agency and its people with one of the kindest brushes in recent memory. This is a movie in which NASA plays a central role—and that’s perhaps one of the most interesting aspects of the story.

Credit: Courtesy 20th Century Fox

After all, this isn’t the cash-strapped agency we see today, but rather a near-future version of NASA that’s been granted the funds to undertake an entire series of five manned Mars landings. Scott’s fictionalized take on the Johnson Space Center is glorious (if a bit silly—in real life, JSC looks mostly like a run down college campus), and the Jet Propulsion Lab gets a large amount of positive screen time.