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The Martian Review




What I liked: I like science and I like outerspace, clearly I liked a movie about science in outerspace. I liked the timelapse sequences of solving problems and growing stuff. I thought they did a remarkably good job conveying a plot consisting of technical questions and keeping people engaged. I liked that Matt Damon was trapped on Mars with no entertainment but disco music, which made a surprisingly good soundtrack. I liked that NASA got to be the heroes in two big movies this year. I loved that Boromir got to be in on the council of Elrond again, that was phenomenal. I wonder if they cast him specifically for that reason. I gained a new appreciation for Anderson; I never knew he had a knack for astrophysics. I guess after being driven to distraction by Sherlock he decided for a change of career and started working for NASA. Speaking of careers working for NASA I want to be whoever it was who got to drill holes in the rover, that looked like fun. I loved the mars rover, both of them. Potatoes! and interesting toppings.Space pirates! I liked seeing good old New Mexico, I really think we have been to the filming location. I think my favorite part was laughing in anticipation of his solutions to the problems when I figured them out.
What I didn’t: For being a story about solving technical problems with science and engineering, these people did very little math. Not that I want to watch them do math but I do feel like something like calculating orbital angles and velocities should probably be done ahead of time and probably with a calculator. I was totally on board with the solutions until about the last 30 min of the movie where they kept getting increasingly absurd. Blowing up your own spaceship is never the correct solution, especially if your response to a damage report is “we’ll worry about that later.” Nope, you probably should have worried about it before you decided to do it. Most of the characters had potential but were sort of blah; I think Damon was a little hobbled by needing to explain everything to his starlog. He was much better than when he was trapped on a deserted planet in Interstellar (still not sure why NASA let him keep going into space after that) but he wasn’t as good as Hanks trapped on a deserted island, or Hanks trapped in space for that matter. I appreciate that running simulations is an important part of solving a problem but I feel like usually the way to do that is not to plug in your laptop to the bank of the supercomputer with a curly usb cable. When the rescue mission is going to take over a year, why would you need to scrub two days of tests? I mean he’s already hungry two days is not going to be that big a deal. Two months? sure, you should probably do some expediting. But 2 days? for a 5% disaster probability? Bad plan. Is there any movie anyone can think of in which the PR people are good guys?
Who should watch this? It was a well made space movie. I think just about everyone would appreciate it.
Would I watch it again? yep, while eating french fries.
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