Richard Brody nails it…every reason I loved The Martian especially compared with Chris Nolan’s overwrought Interstellar. Unlike the sprawling false sentiment of Interstellar, The Martian “…puts on a virtuoso display of cinematic professionalism, aligning all the movie’s elements—visual and sonic, dramatic and thematic, human and material—to move ahead briskly and compactly, with the seeming unity of one meticulously designed and properly functioning machine.” Wow! Sounds great to me!
However, Brody complains (rather incredibly) that there is no sense of wonder in The Martian. He fails to see to “radiance of the ordinary”, especially in people working toward a common good and human ingenuity.
“Scott sees the very fact of space travel, the sheer ingenuity of engineering and the missions that it enables, as beautiful and awe-inspiring. Mark’s daily life on Mars is tinged with wide-eyed astonishment at the extraordinary details of ordinary life under extraordinary conditions.”
Richard Brody, The New Yorker
How jaded do you have to be to fail to be astonished at the technological wonders around you? I spent last Monday at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, wandering through the exhibits of artifacts of earlier civilizations heartened by the wonderful things human beings are capable of creating, if only we put our minds to it and work together. The Martian left me with the same feeling. A reminder of humanity’s other extreme…our impulse to create.
Brody strike me as a man who takes all the wonder around him for granted and seeks his pleasure only in the unexplained. He also complains that the movie is impersonal because it doesn’t focus on relationships or topics outside of work.
I thought that was the best part. No silly backstories, like the one that ruined the immediacy of Gravity.
Apparently Brody has never worked on a project which consumes every waking moment and some sleeping ones. It’s exhausting but also extremely pleasurable, the focus of our creative muscle.
Brody accuses the film of ignoring the psychological effects of isolation on Matt Damon’s character, Mark Watney. Did he take a bathroom break the last third of the movie? Or was Damon’s anguish too nuanced. Hell, he even got a little coda at the end to explain it all in case guys like Brody missed it.
When everything “goes south, and it will”, you either adapt or die. You can resign yourself to fate and sit down and cry about it or you can stand up and do something about it.
This is the story of standing up, of using our wits and wiles against seemingly impossible odds, as an individual and as a community. If that doesn’t thrill your sense of wonder, what can?
What’s Missing from “The Martian”
GPlus Discussion
Cass Morrison – 2015-11-08 09:22:18-0500
I agree with you not the new yorker.
Gideon Rosenblatt – 2015-11-08 09:38:24-0500
What you’re describing is what made this movie different from so many others, +M Sinclair Stevens. It’s what left me feeling I’d experienced something unlike the hundreds of other movies coming out of Hollywood.
Martin Muldoon – 2015-11-08 12:04:57-0500
I thought the Martian was a cross between Castaway and Apollo 13. I was only disappointed by how NASA was depicted as being ridiculously bureaucratic. Scott seemed to want to draw a contrast between a guy who was incredibly resourceful and NASA…squabbling over money, timelines, telling his crew that he lived, etc. Scott went a bit overboard on this I think.
M Sinclair Stevens – 2015-11-08 13:01:32-0500
+Martin Muldoon The head of NASA might have seemed like a bureaucratic roadblock made flesh but I understand his “big picture” approach. NASA doesn’t work without begging for funding, which means it has to make nice with the people holding the purse strings…people who often can’t connect the dots between research and development and the common good (even when it is private enterprise which benefits from government-funded research).
In that environment, you have to choose your battles. Sometimes you sacrifice something that’s really important in order to save the whole. It’s a tough decision and always unpopular…especially among the “troops” those people on the front line who believe passionately about what they’re doing.
Martin Muldoon – 2015-11-08 13:15:18-0500 – Updated: 2015-11-08 13:20:13-0500
+M Sinclair Stevens I’m 100% with you, which is why I felt they were depicted pretty poorly…In Apollo 13, they were truly as heroic as the astronauts. I think NASA has done a FANTASTIC job given their resources. I feel he beat up on NASA a bit….. To be clear….Damon is doing all this amazing stuff, and they are arguing about funds and timelines. It was a deliberate contrast.
Cass Morrison – 2015-11-08 13:56:46-0500
Ridley Scott is anti science, just look at the dreck that is Prometheus. It’s no wonder NASA wasn’t presented kindly.
Martin Muldoon – 2015-11-08 14:30:02-0500
+Cass Morrison I don’t agree… His first claim to fame.. Blade Runner. The end of the movie has the “robot” exhibiting more humanity than the human.
Cass Morrison – 2015-11-08 15:00:08-0500
Blade Runner was long ago, people change.
Peter Strempel – 2015-11-08 15:51:27-0500
Brody of the New Yorker appears to me to be one of those despicable fawning poseurs in the literary landscape who writes to say to others of his ilk: “look, look, I am saying all the right things.’
He is particularly annoying in suggesting that soporific melodrama should have been added to explain what we can all assume actually occurred. Do we need to see Matt Damon’s Watney masturbating to suppose a man in his position might actually have done so? Do we need to see him praying to validate American religious prejudices? Do we need to see more than his monologue request ‘in case of death’ to understand that he might have been pretty blue at times? Did it really matter what racial mix was presented in the film?
Brody is a wanker to suggest Scott needs to reflect his own adolescent weaknesses and misunderstandings to present a good piece of work. Why does the New Yorker let limpid half-people like him write for it?
Most importantly of all, where, in entertainment, is the yardstick that says: ‘Let’s fail spectacularly to make our money back by playing to idiot choldrern like Brody’?
In my estimation it is an admirably paced film that covered a great deal of ground in a couple of hours by sticking to the key points of failure – managing by exception, so to speak – and outdoing the other films in that genre significantly in the suspension of disbelief stakes.