The Martian Review [Archive]

0:00Josh Larsen:Peace to the planet. Charlamagne Tha God here and listen, we are back. The Black Effect Podcast Festival is back in Atlanta on April 25th at Pullman Yard. And the full lineup is nuts. We got the Grit Sineggs podcast, Deontay Kyle and Big Ice Cup Cat. We got Club 520 with Jeff Teague and the gang. Don't call me white girl. Mona will be there. Keep it positive, sweetie, with Crystal Renee. We got reality with the king with Carlos King. And yes, Drink Champs will be in the building. Plus, you know, we're going to have a lot of guests. So you need to join us. And we got the Black Effect Marketplace, the picture podcast and everything you expect from the Black Effect Podcast Festival.

0:38Josh Larsen:Tickets are on sale right now. Go get yours at blackeffect.com slash podcast festival. Don't play yourself, OK? Pull up.

0:50Josh Larsen:When segregation was a law, one mysterious black club owner, Charlie Fitzgerald, had his own rules. Segregation in the day, integration at night. It was like stepping on another world. Was he a businessman? A criminal? A hero? Charlie was an example of power. They had to crush him. Charlie's Place, from Atlas Obscura, and visit Myrtle Beach. Listen to Charlie's Place on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This Women's History Month, the podcast Keep It Positive, Sweetie, celebrates the power of women choosing healing, purpose, and faith, even when life gets messy.

1:28Josh Larsen:Love, it's not a destination. You have to work on it every day. Keep It Positive, Sweetie creates space for honest conversations on self-worth, love, growth, and navigating life with grace and grit, led by women who uplift, inspire, and tell the truth out loud. I have several conversations with God, and I know why it took 20 years. To hear this and more, listen to Keep It Positive, Sweetie on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's the new me, and it's the old them. This Woman's History Month, the podcast If You Knew Better with Amber Grimes spotlights women who turn missteps into momentum and lessons into power.

2:06Adam Kempenaar:My like tunnel vision of like I gotta achieve this was off the strengths of like I want to make a better life for us.

2:12Josh Larsen:If You Knew Better brings real talk from women who've lived it, unpacking career pivots, relationship lessons and the mindset shifts that changed everything. Listen to If You Knew Better with Amber Grimes on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Film Spotting is presented by Regal Unlimited, the all-you-can-watch movie subscription pass that pays for itself in just two visits. See any standard 2D movie anytime with no blackout dates or restrictions. Sign up now on the Regal app or at the link in our description and use code FILMSPOT26 to receive 15 % off.

2:47Adam Kempenaar:Our Oscars theme may be over, but we do have another Best Picture-nominated film up for our Wednesday archive drop. It's The Martian from Ridley Scott. This is an adaptation of the Andy Weir novel. And yes, it is inspired by this weekend's big release, Project Hail Mary. I don't know if you remember this review, if you heard it originally here on Film Spotting. When the film came out in October 2015, the premise of my setup is basically that this movie is just incredibly satisfying. And I can't imagine anybody not liking the film. You don't have to love it. You don't have to think it's a masterpiece.

3:29Adam Kempenaar:You don't have to think it deserved to be a Best Picture nominee. But it's hard for me to imagine anybody watching it and being deeply dissatisfied with it. And I look at Letterboxd and I gave it four stars. Josh Larson gave it four stars. Sam Van Halgren rated it twice and gave it four stars. Why can't there be more movies that deliver this particular kind of pleasure? So satisfying. There's that word, satisfying. Other friends here on Letterboxd. Well, Matt Singer let me down a little bit. MacGyver on Mars, three and a half stars. David Sims, I really enjoy it when Ridley Scott has fun. Four stars.

4:05Adam Kempenaar:Even Mike D 'Angelo, who seems a little bit hard to please sometimes, gave it four out of five stars on Letterboxd. Though there is, well, David Ehrlich. He did, and I love David, two stars in space. Literally everyone can hear you tell and tell and tell and not show for two hours of tedious science porn in crap 3D. Abba, though, maybe that's the problem. He saw it in 3D. I didn't see it in 3D. I gave it four stars. I wonder how many stars you gave it. Let's revisit The Martian from October 2015.

4:41Josh Larsen:I guarantee you that at some point, everything's going to go south on you. Ready? And you're going to say, this is it. This is how I end. Commander Martin's dead. We have to go. Yeah.

5:03Josh Larsen:Now you can either accept that, or you can get to work.

5:09Adam Kempenaar:The last time it was my turn to do one of these intros, the film was Black Mass, which I knew going in, neither of us Josh cared for, so I challenge you to come up with one thing you liked about the movie. You were Mr. Positive. Indeed. Turns out that was a challenge. Even your compliments were backhanded. I'm going to recycle this conceit for The Martian, but with a twist. Unless you think I was just in too much of a hurry to come up with something a little more clever. I mean, come on, after all, The Martian is a movie about an astronaut abandoned on Mars, forced to survive on his creativity, intelligence, and sheer determination.

5:40Adam Kempenaar:Surely, I could have compelled myself to try a little harder while sitting comfortably at the coffee house a few hours ago, eating a scone and drinking a horchata latte while Matt Damon's Mark Watney got by on potatoes grown in his own, well, maybe best we don't talk about that. Let me say this. I walked out of The Martian thinking something I rarely think walking out of a movie. How could anybody not like that? Not going to make your top five or ten films of the year list? Not going to rush back to the theater and see it a second or third time? Not one you're going to run out and buy on Blu-ray the second it's released?

6:12Adam Kempenaar:Fine. I can get behind all of that. But a bad movie? Boring? Unentertaining? Unfunny? Not well shot by director Ridley Scott and DP Darius Volsky, who shot Dark City and Scott's Prometheus, and they also just released The Walk, not well acted by Damon and Jeff Daniels and Chiwetel Ejiofor as NASA directors, and Jessica Chastain and Michael Peña, among others, as Watney's crew members, The Martian is unhateable. What am I missing, Josh? What did you dislike about The Martian? And I'll even spot you a potential answer. Is its utter inoffensiveness, in fact, its downfall? Say what you will about Prometheus, a movie that, despite its surface-level similarities and shared director, I have no desire to dwell on during this review.

6:54Adam Kempenaar:It had grand ambitions. Some people loved it. Some people, like you, mostly loathed it. But it provoked passionate responses. So The Martian, aims high enough or too amiable?

7:05Josh Larsen:It's a crowd pleaser for sure, isn't it? I mean, this thing is probably going to stick around and be amidst the Oscar talk because it does hit all those buttons and it hits them well. I liked it better than this, but usually the Oscar winner is about a three out of four star movie for me that I appreciated. And I'm not surprised to see it win because it is so crowd pleasing. The Martian, though, better than that, I think does work in those ways. If there's something that holds me back a little bit, maybe it is to the degree that it is crowd pleasing towards its end or the way it amps that element up.

7:44Josh Larsen:because I very much think one of the strong qualities of the film is its optimism, its can-do spirit, the way that Damon's Mark Watney is just going to get the job done. No matter what else happens, he's not going to sit around thinking about it or philosophizing about it. He's going to get the job done, and that infiltrates into the entire spirit of the film. I do think when this expands in the scenes where NASA, the NASA engineers and scientists and executives back on Earth are trying to put together a rescue plan for him and the entire globe gets in on this and they begin watching and cheering him along.

8:22Josh Larsen:I felt it got a little we are the world-ish in a way that put me off. I mean, by the point even the Chinese governmental space agency is willing to lend a hand, you're starting to get in a little wishful territory, I think. You know, I mean, everyone's just holding hands around the globe to get this guy home.

8:41Adam Kempenaar:Though, if you think about it just for one second, if you see this whole movie in some ways as a reality TV show, and it is right. It's like being at Big Brother House. It kind of turns into that. On him all the time, whether he has an audience or not, he's talking as if he has an audience. And when we get the whole globe behind him, it does feel like this would be one galvanizing incident that maybe the whole world could actually get behind.

9:05Josh Larsen:That's what the movie wants you to believe. And it's certainly that's why you go out feeling so good, because it does make you believe it. But I think there's I think that's worth questioning and maybe even puncturing because it seeps into earlier parts of the film, too, even into things like these Martian vistas that Scott shoots so majestically. And it has this arid sepia color scheme, but still they're not necessarily threatening areas that we're worried about. They are more, they have the feel of territories that should be explored if not conquered. So there's a very manifest destiny feel to this film that perhaps some people could find troubling.

9:50Josh Larsen:I think that's an element that's worth questioning. And I think it does get amped up towards the end. But really, I was enthralled by this thing. And it's not the type of science fiction that I usually go for. I am more the philosophizing type. I love Solaris. I love 2001, A Space Odyssey. I even love The Fountain, one of my favorite Aronofsky films. So those are the kind of movies that generally appeal to me when it comes to science fiction. I'm also not a guy. It'll take me a while to get a handle on a socket wrench. You know, that's not my natural affinity. I can figure it out, but, you know, give me a little while.

10:24Josh Larsen:And so a movie that's based on just practical science, yes, they're playing up science, but also just doing the work and not sitting around worrying about what it all means. You know, I thought that Scott and Damon, you know, his performance has a lot to do with this, made it compelling every second that it was on the screen.

10:45Adam Kempenaar:Yeah, I'm with you. I love procedurals. I feel like I talked about this recently on the show, but went back through my notes and maybe I'm misremembering. Movies about process, I think, fascinate a lot of people. They really fascinate me, even when and maybe especially when they're about processes that are completely foreign to me, as you just said. Don't know my way around a socket wrench. Certainly don't know my way around botany or any type of astrodynamics. So a lot of the science here. It's mostly duct tape. There you go. You know. Yeah. Well, that's a nice little nod to the practicality that this movie espouses.

11:17Adam Kempenaar:I also love movies about problem solving. And that ultimately is what this movie is about. A character does verbalize it at one point, but it's solved one problem. Another one's going to develop probably. But you just keep solving them until there are no more problems, hopefully. And my lone complaint, if I was going to try to answer my own prompt there, is that it does run into the issue a little bit. that most really detailed, deliberate procedurals run into, which is it devotes so much time to the process that when the plot has to kick in, in the end, so the movie can, you know, end, our hero does either have to make it back home, be rescued, or die trying, it really has to compress time to get there, which also does kind of violate the spirit of the whole movie up to that point.

12:01Adam Kempenaar:It's day by day by day, moment by moment, and then all of a sudden, seven months later. And I feel a little bit lost by that, or I feel like it does, as I said, violate the spirit of the movie.

12:10Josh Larsen:That's a fair question, too. One thing I didn't quite feel as directly as I thought maybe we needed to was the passage of time. There's a section where all of a sudden Watney looks very different. Yeah. It's after that seven months later. Instead of that being gradual, you know, it kind of hits us. So I think that's a fair critique, too.

12:28Adam Kempenaar:Yeah. I do appreciate as well, and you mentioned this with the more philosophical sci-fi movies you get behind. Like a lot of cinephiles, I would say I feel similarly, but I really appreciate this movie ends up being, quote unquote, existential, I think. And it does offer some profound moments without ever having to strain for it. I think true to the procedural nature of it, Watney's existence on Mars alone is sufficient. That's sufficiently existential to make you think about a whole host of really serious things. His simple survival on Mars really is grand enough, I think.

13:02Josh Larsen:And he doesn't have to vocalize it. I think you're absolutely right. One of the sequences that captures that well, and this goes to Damon's performance, which maybe we should talk about, you know, there's just something inherently can do about the guy and matter of fact to me, plain spoken. And, you know, The Departed shows us that something of a ruse, that he has other layers. But for the most part, that's his persona fits so perfectly for this. And maybe too perfectly. There's maybe a way in which he doesn't let us into that hardened exterior shell is so formidable here where he's not going to crack at all, no matter what he faces.

13:37Josh Larsen:And maybe we could say, I'd like to see a little bit more of the inside. But we get one moment where I think that existential nature, again, without being plainly spoken, comes down on us pretty hard. It's after there's a breach in the research station where he has holed up and he has to essentially put a sheet of plastic between himself, again, more duct tape, and the Martian atmosphere, the lethal Martian atmosphere. A storm comes by and we hear the wind sucking in and out that plastic. So it's making this flapping, popping, howling sound. And it's a brief shot of Watney trying to ignore it, trying to perform another task.

14:17Josh Larsen:And at one point he just kind of stops and lets out this low moan. And it's one of the lasting scenes in the movie for me, I think, because it, again, and suddenly gets at what he's really feeling way underneath, but in the manner of this just trying to go about and do his regular work. Right. Let's do the math. Our service mission here was supposed to last 31 souls. For redundancy, they sent 68 souls worth of food. That's for six people. So for just me, that's going to last 300 souls, which I figure I can stretch to 400 if I ration. So I got to figure out a way to grow three years worth of food here.

14:59Josh Larsen:On a planet where nothing grows.

15:05Josh Larsen:Luckily, I'm a botanist.

15:07Adam Kempenaar:The script was written by Drew Goddard, who was part of the team behind Lost, and he co-wrote and directed the very meta Cabin in the Woods. And that's a film that obviously really dissected before our very eyes the horror genre. And at the end of the film, when I saw his credit pop up, I was wondering what drew him to material this ostensibly straightforward. and maybe it was just that, that it is pretty straightforward. Maybe it was a paycheck. Who knows? He did his job well, though. It did occur to me that one potential little subversion to this genre, and I do think obviously there is a rescue genre that this movie fits into, is the way there is nobody waiting for Mark back on Earth, except NASA people and other crew members.

15:51Adam Kempenaar:But they see him as more of a colleague, a fellow professional, not so much a family member, even though those lines, of course, are sometimes blurred. But that whole notion of professionalism and being part of a crew is something this movie devotes a whole lot of time to. And so we get Watney up there on Mars, never pining for his wife or his born or unborn kids, nor do we see them thinking about him and pining for him to return. Our interest in him getting back to Earth isn't caught up in anything emotional. I love that. It's just about the achievement of it. we're caught up in him simply accomplishing the task, him simply solving the problem.

16:30Adam Kempenaar:Yeah.

16:30Josh Larsen:And that diverges from Apollo 13, which otherwise the movie very greatly resembles. Obviously, that's historically based. So you have the families that we know were there. Wait, this movie isn't historically based? This has not happened yet, Adam. Oh, OK. I told you I don't follow science. You got to get out a little bit more. Yeah. So, yeah, I think that that is a key point. There's one reference where he's preparing a goodbye letter to his parents, which I think is helpful in just giving us some context that he didn't just emerge from another planet. This is a guy with some roots on Earth. But it does push then the idea of the colleagues as family because he is abandoned.

17:10Josh Larsen:We shouldn't give away how, but he is abandoned by a crew that was on Mars with him early on in the movie's opening scenes. And they do essentially become his family, especially when they learn that he has survived and they want to be part of the rescue plan. They're not informed of it right away. I will say, you know, thinking about things that maybe didn't quite work, the whole NASA handling of the information and what to let out, the whole PR angle of this film to me felt like a little bit of wasting time or force. Like they were trying to generate some drama beyond what else they had, because essentially, you know, they're worried about the world blaming NASA for leaving this guy behind.

17:53Josh Larsen:I think that's all legitimate.

17:54Adam Kempenaar:I fell for all that.

17:55Josh Larsen:Not if they I mean, if the particulars of what we see of how it happens again, we won't give away the details. But if if they had let that out, no one we would have been singing. We are the world a lot sooner.