The Martian Reviews

Good idea, the accidental colonization of mars by one guy, very realistic. Well narrated by the device of the various cameras Matt Damon talks with; but too long and tedious explaining the rescue.

Excellent story told very well. Damon is in his element and I thought it a strong movie for the acting. There are a lot of logical leaps and a fair amount of predictability, but it's more than intriguing enough to sustain, not to mention some good suspense. Glad to see science such a central theme to the plot. Good stuff!

The Martian is a finely made piece of popcorn entertainment, but thinking about it as anything beyond that is a folly. It’s technical skill cannot be faulted, but its central performance and direction are lacking.

 

It’s clearly not a problem of the script, which sticks smart dialog into various characters, and plays realistically enough with the science to feel incredibly real. Its various twists and turns are handled well from a story-telling perspective, and smartly casts various actors, both movie stars and character types, in various roles to flesh out what isn’t on the page. Yet again, the technique is smart; it’s the execution that’s the problem.

 

Ridley Scott’s direction is antiseptic and impersonal. Scenes of high-tension feel deflated from the razor’s edge. We already know that everything will work out, and it feels more routine and mundane in these sequences. Strangely enough, the scenes of highest interest are the ones in which our stranded astronaut must plan his survival and logically think his way through it all. Scott’s attention to detail and spark in these scenes is missing in many of the action sequences, which dive into beautiful images but lack feeling.

 

Perhaps it’s also that Scott’s pacing is off throughout The Martian. At a bloated two hours and twenty minutes, the pacing goes weird at several points. A sense of monotony takes hold during the middle section as our hero figures out a problem, everything is going smoothly, then we just know something has to gone wrong, then an explosion kicks in, and science is used to solve that problem. Repeat until the climax. It becomes mechanical and unthinking, looping through these sequences again and again and again.

 

Perhaps a change in leading man would have helped matters. Movie stars come with baggage, and sometimes they’re the only way a studio will gamble on a project. I understand the casting of Matt Damon, but I never believed it was anything other than Matt Damon dropping monologues to the audience, growing a beard, and losing a weight. We know Damon won’t die, because he’s Matt Damon, and he comes loaded with a baggage. It removes some of the survivalist interest and tension from the film, effectively taking the wind out its sails. Damon does fine movie star work, but we’ve seen him dig deeper and do better work in films like The Departed or Good Will Hunting.

 

But looking at the glossy exteriors, the lovely special effects work, the solid costume design, and appealing cinematography, The Martian is a gigantic beast. I sometimes wonder how modern films would play out as silent films, and perhaps The Martian would work wonders as a silent film. It’s a lovely series of highly detailed images drifting by. I applaud the film for placing the foundations of it story on science, engineering, logic, and problem-solving, but a little poetry, awe, and wonder would have gone a long way to making The Martian something better.

Matt Damon and Ridley Scott scienced the shit out of this movie! Awesome work!
If you liked Robert Zemeckis's Contact (1997) or Christopher Nolan's Interstellar (2014), you will like this too.

Going for a slow burn introduction before upping the action has been a technique used many times previously by Ridley Scott, but in The Martian he has chosen to hit the ground running by starting with the dramatic events which leave astronaut Mark Watney (Matt Damon) stranded, and apparently without hope of survival or rescue on Mars.  The opening of the film was very effective in immersing the audience in the situation and will doubtless please those who have dismissed the slower pace of previous Scott movies as boring.  As the story progresses the pace does fluctuate between kinetic action set pieces and more thoughtful, leisurely sequences.  The change in mood between sequences is handled very well.

After the disappointing 'Prometheus', the almost abysmal 'The Counselor' and the really underwhelming 'Exodus: Gods and Kings', I was starting to loose faith in Ridley Scott and I can’t say I was expecting much from this flick. I mean, sure, I'm glad that the guy, at almost 80 years old, is still incredibly productive but what's the point of releasing a new movie virtually every year if they are all going to be half-baked? Fortunately, this one managed to get a pretty good buzz before it was released so there was some hope. Eventually, I have to admit that it was indeed pretty good but, to be honest, it didn’t really manage to completely blow me away though. I mean, the whole thing looked really good, it was really entertaining and it was very nice that Scott tried to make a smart movie for once but it was still missing something in my opinion. I guess, at the end of the day, even though they tried really hard to convince us that it was really clever, I think it was still too shallow, like most of the movies directed by Scott. For example,  not so long ago, I saw 'All is lost', another movie about Robert Redford all alone trying to survive on a drifting boat and even though it wasn’t really great, I really had the feeling that the guy could die every 5 minutes and you could really feel the mental agony that the main character must have felt through his ordeal. Here,  even though Matt Damon did deliver a solid performance, I never felt that the main character's life was really at risk and the fact that he keeps cracking jokes all the time might have been fun to watch and easier to swallow but it also really diminished the psychological impact  of what he was actually going through. It is like adding all these other characters, it actually distracts us constantly from  how messed up his situation actually was. Still, for a popcorn movie, it was at least not dumb at all and I have to admit that the damned thing was actually seriously entertaining. Anyway, to conclude, even though I think it is actually overrated, it is still a really good flick though and one of the best made by Ridley Scott in the last 10 years.