2015 RE-VISITED, PART ONE: I Watched "The Martian." I Have Questions.
Some questions I had after watching Ridley Scott’s latest attempt to direct good movies again.
Why did we have to see anyone else other than Mark Watney? His story was clearly the most compelling and original (exempting all the glaring similarities to Duncan Jones’ vastly superior Moon), so why did we need to meet the cavalcade of generic Hollywood archetypes back on Earth? Imagine if the film had maintained POV with Watney the entire time, so that we as an audience truly felt his loneliness and desperation? In that iteration, imagine how it would have felt when he made contact with NASA for the first time? This structure could have shaved off 45 minutes of unnecessary exposition via a constant string of press conferences, scientists taking off their glasses saying “my god,” the very realistic phenomenon of NASA scientists explaining science to other NASA scientists using incredibly simplistic terms and charades involving objects, etc. The film’s tone was generally popcorn-y and pleasurable with just Damon on screen, which made me believe from the get-go that he was going to be rescued no matter what… thus nullifying the bullshit stakes set up back on Earth: will they reach him in time? Will their pod take off successfully? Will they make contact with him? Of course they fucking will. I don’t want to hang out with these people because they’re not real people; Watney is, so let’s stick with him.
Why, in 2015 screenwriting, are we not finessing our Deus Ex Machina a little better? Why are we not making the slightest attempts to disguise it? I expected so much more of Drew Goddard, who is an accomplished and talented writer. Contact asked a lot of the audience when it suddenly brought in a miraculously convenient identical wormhole device after the first one got destroyed… and it has almost been 20 years since that movie. How are we still getting away with pieces of bullshit plot like the first pod getting destroyed, and then suddenly cutting to China, where they have a miraculously convenient identical pod to send supplies to Mars? We couldn’t have set up at least once in the 1.75 hours before that the Chinese were considering helping NASA? Or that they had a pod in development? We couldn’t have met Rich Parnell earlier? We couldn’t have taken one moment to think hope was lost between the first pod getting destroyed and NASA Director Will McAvoy receiving a call solving everything?
Why was Rich Parnell allowed to waltz into NASA’s Director of Mars Missions office so easily? Don’t these sorts of things require scheduling meetings? He’s probably a busy man, definitely around this time. Childish just walks in the room, flashes his badge and commands Vincent Kapoor to get off the phone… and Kapoor just does it?
Why was time devoted to setting up stakes around whether or not the crew of the Hermes would a) receive the information about Rich Parnell’s wacky plan and b) whether or not they would take the mission? In fact, as I mentioned earlier, every set of stakes established in this film felt so hollow, and reeked of such bullshit I’m surprised anyone felt the slightest tension or experienced drama: oh no, the Pathfinder isn’t light enough to reach the Hermes because blah blah blah so how will Watney ever make it to them? Oh no, the velocity of the Hermes is something something something so now we need to course correct and HERE’S SOME AWESOME SCIENCE SO SHUT UP! Will Commander Lewis reach Watney floating in space? Gosh I don’t know! What a nailbiter!
Why was the recurring joke of Commander Lewis’ “horrible” taste in music given so much goddamn attention? Did Goddard and Scott really find it that hilarious? Also, are you really asking an audience to agree with Watney that ABBA, Donna Summer and Gloria Gaynor constitute “bad” music taste? It’s like the film’s producers needed to insert (and re-insert, and re-insert) the joke, but then wimped out on, oh I don’t know, actually using bad music? They obviously capitulated to making this movie universally appealing, so better to use songs that everyone knows and ask us to laugh when we’re told they’re bad, than playing something believably awful? Or maybe I’m just really weird for thinking that I wouldn’t have minded so much if I had to listen to disco on repeat for 4 years, as opposed to Beefheart or something.
Why are we using Bowie’s “Starman” in a montage? Is there no subtlety left in Hollywood? Actually, I take that question back, because when I really think about it, The Martian is quite possibly the least subtle film of the last 5 years.
Why did this film feel like such an obvious mishmash of everything Sunshine, Moon, 2001, Solaris, Contact, Gravity, and even Interstellar (which I loathe) did so much better?
Why did the same man who directed Alien, Blade Runner, Thelma And Louise and Gladiator choose to veer his career toward such a sugar-coated, unexciting trajectory? And why the fuck is anyone letting him near the next installments of the aforementioned first two beloved science fiction masterpieces?
Overall, it’s like Ridley Scott and Drew Goddard shoved every plot development in The Martian in our mouths and asked us to swallow, as if to say, “take this at face value and don’t ask questions, because movies.”