Rating: 3/4 stars
Its all superheroes and explosions these days, it seems. Every year brings us another pile of visual comic books, replete with the same cookie-cutter plots, flashy color palettes, expensive budgets, and a complete lack of anything resembling a story or character development.
Good films, and good science fiction films, by comparison, are very hard to come by. But that’s probably why the few good ones that come around are so special, and so surprising. Ridley Scott’s “The Martian” is one of those rare treats, a king-sized candy bar hidden among all the fruit and weird healthy candies old that people love to hand out during halloween.
What makes “The Martian” so special is the human story it tells. The film does an excellent job of developing the characters and making sure they’re not just expendable faces on the screen. They all seem like real people, and talk like real people. There’s lots of great dialogue, lots of great bleak humour, and by the end of the film you’re really rooting for Matt Damon’s character to make it back home.
The other huge selling point of the film is its dedication to scientific accuracy. Its not perfect, and there are a few moments where you might be raising your eyebrows a bit, but for the most part everything seems at least plausible, if not probable. And that’s probably one of the most enjoyable things about the movie. You really get to take a look and see what a mission to Mars (something that may very well happen in the not-too-distant future) might actually look like. Its the best kind of fantasy: one that might come true.
Where maybe the film fails a bit is that it never gets too serious or cerebral. It doesn’t really ask any difficult questions, or challenge you to think about any weighty, moral issues regarding space travel, but then, maybe that’s okay. Movies that make you think are very good, but sometimes its nice just to be able to sit back and enjoy something.
And with The Martian, that’s what you get to do. It’s incredibly fun watching Matt Damon’s botanist astronaut Mark Watney figure out all kinds ingenious solutions to his various problems, especially knowing that during the Apollo missions the same sort of problem solving and creativity was needed to bring everyone home in one piece.
Ultimately The Martian is a love letter to space exploration, and to the ingenuity of the human race as a whole. Its a good, smart film, and definitely one of the better movies this year.