A Supermassive Monster-tainer!

Rating: 10/10 (2 October 2015)

I superduper love the book. Andy Weir's book is practically celebrating the geeky nerd in me, but I am under no illusion that Ridley Scott can just take huge chunks of Mark Watney's thoughts and monologues, shoot them and wala the movie would work. It wouldn't. The science experiments, the guess and check methodology and the constant hypothesis testing do not make for anything cinematic and most people will go into deep space slumber by Sol 47. What Scott and his team did is to take all the compelling narrative elements and propel them with an authoritative drive, and The Martian becomes for me, this year's most undeniable supermassive monster-tainer of the nth degree.
The narrative is not new. I am sure anyone can see this is a concoction of Robinson Crusoe, with a heavy dose of Apollo 13 and Gravity. I love this genre tremendously and I am now going to tell you a secret - I love watching terrible movies like Deep Blue Sea and Anaconda. There, I said it, and I don't care if I lose your respect :). There is something so primal, singular and compelling about a character solving problems to survive in the face of insurmountable odds. In The Martian, Astronaut Mark Watney (Matt Damon) is presumed dead after a fierce storm and left behind by his crew. But Watney has survived and finds himself stranded and alone on the hostile planet. With only meager supplies, he must draw upon his ingenuity, wit and spirit to subsist and find a way to signal to Earth that he is alive. This narrative can be found in many films and it is IMHO best articulated by this quote - "I guess it comes down to a simple choice, really. Get busy living or get busy dying." If you know where this is taken from, we must be related in some way :). Watney articulates the same sentiment in the epilogue of the movie, which is not found in the book.
How Scott succeeded in reining in his usual self-important space opera mumbo jumbo is already cause for celebration. His hand is light, sure and every creative choice he made serves the story. We get wide vistas of Mars and the spacecraft, but somehow Scott stops himself from underscoring them with his usual larger than life signature. By doing that the story of one extraordinary man on Mars becomes front and centre, and bigger than everything. The cast is solid all round, especially Matt Damon who carries the movie on his everyday man's shoulders. His smarts and snarky personality shining through. We rise and fall on his little successes like repurposing his excrement as fertilizer and we laugh with him through his not too outrageous notion of colonization.
For once, and for such a welcome relief, this movie is populated with super-intelligent people who don't do stupid dumb things like touching unknown objects or walking into unknown territory. This particular genre is full of these stereotypes but you will find none here. There is not much melodrama here to manipulate you emotionally. You are not going to see a scene of an insufferable wife calling from Earth to make sure Watney doesn't give up (watch Everest for that and I don't mean that in a bad way). What we have here is a tenacious man solving problems like how to make water, grow food, and communicate with NASA on an unforgiving planet. There is no monster, no inner demons, no anger towards God, just one man who is ready to "science the sh*t out of it" as he "gets busy living".
Who would have thought watching a man's constant efforts to stay alive for another day makes for such compelling cinema. Some of the great stuff in the book like the broken drill bit and the accident with the rover on the final trip to Ares 4 didn't make it into the film, but I am not taking any points away. This is a superb tribute to human ingenuity and will probably make young people want to study harder. It may not have pushed the envelope in terms of cinema but it succeeded in what it set out to do - a supermassive feel-good visual extravaganza. I am so glad I sat between my wifey and a geeky teenager. The dude was gasping in wonder and cheering animatedly through some of the amazing scenes. This type of special effects money can't buy. My wife said that boy is probably me when I was a boy. She is right.