Movie Thoughts: The Martian
The Martian got my attention when it opened. Good notices helped there in this case, but so did simple interest in another "realistic space" movie showing up not that long after Gravity and Interstellar, both of which I'd seen at the movies. That, though, seemed to turn into a reproach when the Saturday afternoons that seem the most available time for me to go to a movie with so many other diversions and distractions kept getting taken up by one thing or another. When one of those afternoons opened up at last, however, I did get to the single "flat" showing that day at my local theatre.
There might have been a thing or two about this movie I was hoping for, but an awareness or two as well. I had been able to tell, perhaps even without being told, that there were some things about the orbital manoeuvring in Gravity that weren't quite realistic, and Interstellar did leave me thinking, just a bit, that it wanted to be taken as more "grounded" than it really was, although a good part of that might have been its unapologetic use of the old and somewhat dubious storyline "we've made a mess of Earth, but we'll just relocate somewhere else" and some of the decisions its characters made once in space. The Martian, on the other hand, had been adapted from a novel, apparently well-adapted from what I'd heard. From sources including a promotional interview in Smithsonian Air & Space magazine, I understood the novel had been worked out in detail. I still hadn't read the novel, though, which just gets me thinking of how rusty I've got at taking in prose fiction. If there was a specific disconnection, I fear it came from remembering other "realistic space" novels with plenty of negative editorial comments about how things have turned out in real life and schemes of their own to push. It's not that I can't see the point of that (so far as "we've been talking about this for a while" goes, there was a movie made a bit over five decades ago now called Robinson Crusoe on Mars, featuring if not starring a pre-typecast Adam West), but it can get pretty glum.
It got my attention, then, to see NASA logos on the spacesuits (just as it did in Interstellar, although that movie made up its own logo rather than arrange to use the real one), and while there might have been just a trace of "we can't admit he's alive now" to start with the people on Earth soon seemed to be pulling as hard as the stranded Mark Watney. So far as I could tell, the solutions people were coming up with seemed reasonable yet intriguing and even amusing, the explanations were nicely in between over-verbose and too vague, and the space travel scenes also didn't seem too exaggerated for effect. While there was a bit of language that seemed strong for the rating, it was understandable enough in the circumstances. I did wonder afterwards about issues of isolation, but also reflected that while the joke in the novel must have been Watney being stuck listening to 1970s disco (the future residents who take in nothing but twentieth century pop culture to save the risk of having to invent art within art is familiar enough in science fiction), the joke was on us in the movie because we were listening to it too. It may be early yet to think ahead to home video releases and online streaming, but at the moment I can contemplate watching the movie again. I've also wondered about getting around to reading the novel as well; even if the movie points to the novel in the end, I can suppose that means it worked.
This entry was originally posted at http://krpalmer.dreamwidth.org/246744.html. Comment here or there (using OpenID) as you please.
There might have been a thing or two about this movie I was hoping for, but an awareness or two as well. I had been able to tell, perhaps even without being told, that there were some things about the orbital manoeuvring in Gravity that weren't quite realistic, and Interstellar did leave me thinking, just a bit, that it wanted to be taken as more "grounded" than it really was, although a good part of that might have been its unapologetic use of the old and somewhat dubious storyline "we've made a mess of Earth, but we'll just relocate somewhere else" and some of the decisions its characters made once in space. The Martian, on the other hand, had been adapted from a novel, apparently well-adapted from what I'd heard. From sources including a promotional interview in Smithsonian Air & Space magazine, I understood the novel had been worked out in detail. I still hadn't read the novel, though, which just gets me thinking of how rusty I've got at taking in prose fiction. If there was a specific disconnection, I fear it came from remembering other "realistic space" novels with plenty of negative editorial comments about how things have turned out in real life and schemes of their own to push. It's not that I can't see the point of that (so far as "we've been talking about this for a while" goes, there was a movie made a bit over five decades ago now called Robinson Crusoe on Mars, featuring if not starring a pre-typecast Adam West), but it can get pretty glum.
It got my attention, then, to see NASA logos on the spacesuits (just as it did in Interstellar, although that movie made up its own logo rather than arrange to use the real one), and while there might have been just a trace of "we can't admit he's alive now" to start with the people on Earth soon seemed to be pulling as hard as the stranded Mark Watney. So far as I could tell, the solutions people were coming up with seemed reasonable yet intriguing and even amusing, the explanations were nicely in between over-verbose and too vague, and the space travel scenes also didn't seem too exaggerated for effect. While there was a bit of language that seemed strong for the rating, it was understandable enough in the circumstances. I did wonder afterwards about issues of isolation, but also reflected that while the joke in the novel must have been Watney being stuck listening to 1970s disco (the future residents who take in nothing but twentieth century pop culture to save the risk of having to invent art within art is familiar enough in science fiction), the joke was on us in the movie because we were listening to it too. It may be early yet to think ahead to home video releases and online streaming, but at the moment I can contemplate watching the movie again. I've also wondered about getting around to reading the novel as well; even if the movie points to the novel in the end, I can suppose that means it worked.
This entry was originally posted at http://krpalmer.dreamwidth.org/246744.html. Comment here or there (using OpenID) as you please.