Long, boring, and wrong

Rating: 5/10 (14 February 2016)

This film is misconceived and far too long (2 hours 24 minutes) for us to watch one man in a spacesuit talking to himself. The idea of Robinson Crusoe on Mars may seem good for a book, but does not make for a good film. It was clever to cast Matt Damon as Mars-Crusoe, because he is an excellent actor, highly watchable, and does as well as anyone could. Jeff Daniels is one of my favourite actors, but he is entirely miscast as the Director of NASA. The director, Ridley Scott, became far too involved in the technical story of how the guy can survive when trapped on a planet far from home. He forgot that not everyone watching would find the survival saga as absorbing as Scott clearly did, at least not for two and a half hours. I once spent a long time writing a screenplay with Arthur C. Clarke based on his novel A FALL OF MOONDUST, which is about some people trapped on the Moon, and how can they be rescued. (The film was never made because of costs at that time.) I therefore know more about coping with stories of characters stuck on a body in space than most people, and I can say the struggle was to get one's nose out of all the technical detail so that it did not just become an engineering lesson and still remained a human drama. This does not happen with Scott's film. The characters are all made of cardboard, and a lot of good actors like Kate Mara are just wasted because they are barely glimpsed. And then one comes to all the errors. It has already been pointed out on IMDb that the sandstorm on Mars which occurs early in the film would be impossible there. So already from the very beginning, we are in fantasy land. There are some other errors which the producers and Scott probably have no way of knowing, so they cannot be blamed. All the senior people at NASA have known for a long time that there are huge stores of water as ice beneath the Martian surface, and therefore the 'shortage of water problem' in the story is not viable either, though admittedly this information has never been made public. As for China Aerospace, it certainly does not look like that, as I have been there many times. Nor would the Chinese space officials ever be able to make a political decision and 'keep it between us space agencies' as we see in the film, and use a Chinese rocket to save a marooned American on their own initiative. How fantastically naïve can you get? Nor is NASA a purely civilian space agency, as the film says, since if you read its founding charter you can see that it is required to have a military mission as well. More important still is something which is genuinely secret, though why it is secret I cannot imagine. Arthur Clarke through his friendship with the top people at NASA was given some photographs of the Martian surface which have never been released to the public. He showed them to me. They were high resolution photos taken from a very low altitude. Indeed, my best guess is that if they had been taken by a normal camera they were taken from about 500 feet. However, they were probably enlargements of detail from photos taken at a much higher altitude using all the super-camera technology which the US Government has for satellite photography. They were not however taken 'straight down' from a satellite in high orbit, as they were all at a forward-looking angle. What they showed beyond any doubt whatsoever were copses of trees and lots of bushes. The trees were shaped like pine trees, and were clearly gymnosperms (evergreen firs, with needles rather than leaves). They showed no signs of having been bent over by prevailing winds, and stood upright. They were very dark green and looked pretty rugged and tough. They grew in clumps of anywhere between two or three together, to perhaps twenty to thirty together, scattered here and there in the red land and hills. In other words, there were no actual forests. None of them grew near any sign of surface water. My subjective impression of these pathetic clumps of trees is that they were sad remnants of what may once have been more extensive tree cover. Another interpretation however is that they were seeded from earth randomly by seeds blown up above Earth's atmosphere in storms. (Some seeds can survive travel through space and exposure to space radiation and still germinate.) Someone I know who once worked for NASA in relation to Mars soil sampling told me he found clear evidence of live bacteria in Mars soil sampled on Mars remotely by a probe, but his findings were dismissed and never acknowledged, and there is a policy of sterilizing all soil recovered from any body in space which would kill any bacteria before they could reach Earth for analysis here. As for the bushes on Mars seen in the photos, they looked like very tough desert bushes, certainly not succulents, and must have had woody stems. They did not appear to have leaves of the usual kind and were very scraggly. So why all the secrecy? What is there about scattered trees and bushes on Mars that is worth concealing? Wouldn't it have been fun if Ridley Scott had known about the trees and had tweaked the noses of NASA by showing them in his film? That at least would have been more interesting than the potatoes grown by Damon. A scene where Damon explores a clump of Martian trees, now there you would have a really good scene. And show him boring for Martian sub-surface water. Oh well, maybe next time.