Send Him Friends

Rating: 8/10 (5 November 2015)

I joked before this came out that it should have been re-written from the book to act as an explanation to why Interstellar didn't just settle humans on Mars. Maybe they find some big reason with Matt's mission that means Mars is out of the question later... or better yet, he lies, cuz he's a lying liar who steals spaceships and makes up stories why Mars is unfit for colonies. No luck. But all is not lost.
This is more realistic, I think, than either Gravity or Interstellar, though it's still trying very hard to be as NASA as possible, with big space ships, "private time", and, in the case of The Martian, not wanting to logically and rationally use the resources of Mars to survive... like making your own fuel for your buggy so you don't have to keep recharging it so frequently. Internal combustion works so much better, folks. If they'd put that in, though, I guess NASA loses face since they didn't come up with that first.
NASA does get some cute rib cracking PR-shill "image management" stuff by way of Kristen Wigg. She was adorable and hilarious. That was a pleasant surprise. We really need Congress to pass a law stopping agencies from spending any money on influencing public opinion at all. Equally surprising was Jeff Daniels' complex director and the dynamics with staff.
The dust storm was not only stupid, but looked like it was ripped right out of Prometheus. That briefly took me out of the movie. I'm not sure why Mars movies keep using that. Rocket Man. Red Planet (not as bad as it originally seemed... watch it again, forget the horrible Mission to Mars). There's enough danger in space and on Mars not to need borrowing anything from LV426's eviler twin (the hell didn't they just make it LV426 in that movie?!).
It also seemed like half their crew was red headed, which made me think maybe the gingers were being relocated to Mars or at least were being seeded there to save their race from recessive gene homogeneity extinction here on Earth or something. Hah. But nope...
By the end of it, I was slightly perturbed they didn't just send more people and stuff to join Matt instead. If you have a family back on Earth, why are you even being chosen to go there in the first place? The end does attempt to explain the utility of this, at least. They'd be better off just spending the money to keep sending more people and supplies there rather than building huge starships and trying to launch off Mars. Besides, getting off the red planet is not an easy notion.
They still oversimplify the orbital mechanics a teeny tiny bit and in one stinker line actually wonder how much fuel it would take to just point their nose where they want to go and fire an engine in orbit. At least they do mention the word "altitude" soon after, but that whole exchange seemed like a slip.
They could have done more to show the communications delay. They talk about it once or twice and then kind of sort of show it explicitly a little, but there's a lot of editing and a lot of not taking the best route, which is showing the characters doing something else in the meantime between messages.
While some of the dialog in Gravity was truly awful and its realism was more akin to "truthiness" than any sense of space science accuracy (it looked great, though), I think on the whole, The Martian is only about at Gravity's level in terms of satisfaction in the film-going experience kind of way, ignoring the science factor and Gravity's lame dialog in the beginning that I found easy to forgive. Don't get me wrong; I found both satisfying enough to recommend.
The sometimes laborious Interstellar I'd still put slightly up a notch even with its bizarrely-abbreviated time between discovering NASA and the launch, and then the clunky and obvious tesseract and watch scene. There is something more lofty and artistic about Interstellar, even if you ignore the intimations of quantum gravity propulsion and future affecting the past that I am obviously partial to (you're welcome, Jonathan Nolan... I'm just glad someone, anyone, used it). Time dilation, even though they took the goofy route of using a neat- looking but unnecessary black hole to encounter it along with the needlessness of a wormhole, however also pretty, to transit to it, is a wonderful dramatic device that clearly too many science fiction screen writers neglect. You have to give Interstellar props for both using time dilation, having an artful structure, and even loftier themes than The Martian, even with the clunk factor of yet another The Brothers Nolan project's third act not quite living up to the rest. There's nothing *that* unpredictable about The Martian, either. In comparison, I think the final scene of Interstellar is brilliant and *it* had totally slipped my mind.
I liked The Martian. I recommend it. Could have been better, but I'm thankful we got three pretty darn good harder sci fi space films of late. They're not entertaining or artistic enough for me to quite want to watch them repeatedly as some others of my favorites. Decent occasional experiences that are notable for being more realistic and not so stupid all the time like most the crap Hollywood pumps out. That's something to be thankful for.