'The Martian' takes viewers to new frontier

“The Martian,” Ridley Scott’s new space adventure starring Matt Damon as botanist Mark Watney, is not what everyone thought it would be. Trailers foretold a pulse accelerating thriller fueled by disasters on an alien frontier -- Mars, humanity’s next stepping stone. The movie has plenty of high blood pressure moments to keep viewers alert, but the marketing department’s portrayal is hardly genuine.

In reality, “The Martian,” released Oct. 2, has maybe half a foot in the thriller genre, with the other foot and a half in comedy. The story of how Watney becomes stranded on the red planet feels a bit contrived, but the movie wastes no time getting straight into the action. Scott squanders not a single moment of his opus’s almost two-and-a-half-hour runtime. Even the silent panning CGI shots of Mars’s barren and inhospitable surface are worth every second.

While Scott uses these shots to show viewers how lonely life on an empty planet can be, the writers, Drew Goddard and Andy Weir, use the dialogue to show life continuing on, even in a vacuum. The dialogue tells viewers about the trials and quirks of surviving an inhospitable environment in clever, sometimes absurd, ways that will make viewers enjoy these lessons in the technicalities of space exploration.

For example, because of the United Nations Treaties and Principles on Outer Space, no nation on Earth can lay claim to land off the planet’s surface. As a result, maritime law applies on all planets to which humans travel. Technicalities abound, however; while Watney is inside the NASA base on Mars he is bound by United States law, but while outside he is in international waters and under a totally different legal system. In light of this, Watney argues that he is the first human space pirate as well as the first colonizer of Mars, all with decent legal, scientific and anthropological evidence.

The general, simplified gist of the movie is this: Watney encounters a challenge, finds and explains a solution to address the challenge and finally executes the solution. The plot swings from a tragedy of errors to a comedy of solutions and sits at a happy equilibrium between the two genres. Much of the film shows Damon talking to the camera about his troubles and random thoughts (Watney keeps a video log for the edification of any eventual Mars explorers). Interspersed are montages of the protagonist going about life alone on a planet where one small problem could spell death for him.

Performances on the whole are quite good, and with such a stacked cast they should be. Besides Damon, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Kristen Wiig, Jeff Daniels, Jessica Chastain, Sean Bean, Kate Mara and Donald Glover all make appearances in this film and deliver solid, if tangential, performances. Glover’s character, a space cadet of a different sort, is a particularly unlikely hero and entertaining addition to the story.

For all of its technical discussions and lessons, “The Martian” is first and foremost a story about humanity in all its facets. It is the story of achievement and ingenuity, overcoming petty conflicts (at least, petty in the context of interplanetary travel) and dealing with complex moral realities. Is it worth exposing government secrets to save one person? Should we risk five lives for the sake of one? How do you travel the width of the United States in a rover whose design only supports short daytrips? And is disco music acceptable even when it’s the only music on the whole planet?  These, and many more, are the questions “The Martian” confronts. With the plot’s various strands rather neatly tied up at the end, this is not a movie that will leave its viewers mulling over questions and deep concerns at the end; rather, it will leave viewers in awe of what they have just watched. “The Martian” is a feat of content and technical skill.

The thesis of the movie seems to be that, no matter where humans go, no matter what challenges they confront on the furthest and least hospitable frontiers, humanity is everywhere. “The Martian” is an ode -- if, at times, an overly enthusiastic one -- to humanity at its best.