Back in 2015, Ridley Scott’s The Martian was released to critical acclaim, box office success, and several shelves’ worth of awards. Adapted from Andy Weir’s novel of the same name, The Martian puts a sci-fi spin on the familiar survival drama by having the central castaway stranded on Mars as opposed to a desert island or a shipwreck.
Matt Damon stars as botanist Mark Watney, who’s left behind by his fellow crew members on a mission to Mars when he’s swept away by a dust storm and presumed dead. He survives the storm, realizes he’s completely alone on the red planet, and starts working on a plan to stretch a week’s worth of food across several months while he tries to get in touch with Earth. But taking place on Mars isn’t the only way Scott’s movie subverts the tropes of the survival drama.
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Most survival movies, from Cast Away to 127 Hours to The Revenant to All is Lost to The Road, are bleak, miserable affairs about unenviable people enduring the worst possible conditions, battling against the remorseless elements, and slowly losing the will to live. This might be an accurate portrait of human suffering, but it doesn’t necessarily make for a fun night at the movies.
What makes The Martian different than other survival movies (besides its setting) is that its protagonist remains optimistic and upbeat in the face of unimaginable adversity. Watney, played brilliantly by Damon, maintains his sense of humor while he’s stranded alone on another planet. He has no one to talk to except his video log and nothing to do except make the impossible possible. Constantly cracking jokes throughout the whole ordeal is what saves him from losing his mind.
The odds are stacked ridiculously against Watney. All the most important equipment he could use to contact Earth has been destroyed in the storm that stranded him there and being millions of miles away from his home planet means that even if he can get in touch with them, it’ll be months before the crew can come back and get him. In a traditional survival drama, Watney would accept his fate and wait to die. But in The Martian, he’s determined to “science the s*** out of this” and figure out a way to get home.
While there are a lot of big laughs in The Martian, it’s still primarily a drama. When the movie was nominated in the “Musical or Comedy” categories at the Golden Globes, it was a bit of a stretch. Watney goes through the anguish of thinking he’ll never see any of his family and friends again and the months of starvation and isolation take a real mental and physical toll on his wellbeing. Damon nails all the comedic deliveries, but his turn as Watney is a decidedly dramatic performance, more than deserving of his Oscar nod. The Martian is funny, but it’s not a comedy. It’s an emotionally engaging movie that tugs on the heartstrings and asks some very universal questions. It’s one of the most quintessentially human films of Scott’s storied career.
Watney’s sense of humor is just a small part of his character. Joking his way through the pain is certainly one of his main coping mechanisms, but his most important trait is his determination. He fights the urge to give up and continually defies the odds. Early in the movie, he says, “I’m not gonna die here,” and the audience wants that to be true. There’s a big difference between a movie where the audience roots for the protagonist because they’re supposed to and a movie where the audience roots for the protagonist because they want to. Viewers of The Martian don’t just want to see Watney get back to Earth because the movie tells them to; it’s because they’re genuinely endeared to him and want his story to have a happy ending.
For years, Mars had been considered box office poison. The Martian was expected to bomb, purely because pretty much every other movie set on Mars had bombed: Red Planet, John Carter, Mission to Mars, Ghosts of Mars, Mars Needs Moms. With an impressive global haul of $630 million, The Martian broke the Mars movie curse, because the life-affirming message and heartwarming tone resonated with audiences. An optimist like Mark Watney is somebody that moviegoers can look up to and cheer on.
The studio blockbuster market is currently lacking in originality and subversions of familiar formulas. As a big-budget sci-fi epic that provided both in spades, The Martian made quite a splash when it hit theaters. After a string of disappointing duds – Body of Lies, Robin Hood, Prometheus, The Counselor, and Exodus: Gods and Kings – The Martian marked a career comeback for the legendary filmmaker behind Alien and Blade Runner. The genius of a director like Sir Ridley Scott is that they take subversive source material like The Martian and subvert the audience’s expectations even further.
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