MEXICO: On Monday, NASA surprised the world by announcing it had found water on Mars. To the jaded and conspiracy-minded – who are drawn to stories about the space agency like flies to the lights of Capricorn One – the reveal seemed less like a bit of great news in the annals of science and more a dastardly Hollywood marketing trick to promote Friday’s release of The Martian. But Ridley Scott’s sci-fi drama doesn’t need any PR stunts: It’s pure blockbuster cinema, expertly engineered to appeal to the widest audience possible. Mere word of mouth, not secretive schemes, will ensure its box-office success.
Of course, the movie is also the best advertisement NASA could ever hope for. Unlike recent films that portray space travel as a terrifying ordeal (Interstellar, Gravity, Scott’s own Prometheus), The Martian makes the outer limits and the scientists who explore them not only fun, but smart, sexy and cool. Hell, I’m scared of simply sleeping outdoors and I walked out of the movie with just the tiniest daydream of strapping myself into a rocket and shooting for the stars (ideally with Matt Damon as my co-pilot).
Most radically, though, it’s not brawn or quips or deus ex machinas that save the day in The Martian: it’s simple intelligence and ingenuity. There’s a central hero here, sure, but the film is not meant to celebrate the efforts of one man. Instead, the saviour of the day is science. I doubt a single blockbuster over the past decade could say the same thing.
Credit for this wild diversion from the status quo chiefly goes to Andy Weir and Drew Goddard. The former’s self-published novel is not only an expertly written thriller, but a love letter to the stirring heights of the human brain. (After selling 35,000 e-book copies in three months, Crown Publishing purchased the rights for a proper hardcover version.) In the wrong hands, a big-budget adaptation could have turned Weir’s witty and technically sound, prose into plodding sci-fi gobbledegook. Thankfully, Goddard (The Cabin in the Woods, Cloverfield) is one of the smartest screenwriters working today and instead smoothed Weir’s words into a tightly crafted ode to creativity.
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