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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.
