Review: The Martian

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We watched the movie The Martian last night.  My wife and I were thoroughly pleased with the movie, despite the fantastic aspects of it, and the over-the-top exaggeration of some scenes and events.  I think that most successful Hollywood producers and directors tend to believe that modern movie audiences will not take a movie seriously without some surreal scenes or fantastic representations of fairly simple events.  But the most attractive thing about the movie was that it was so plausible.  Like the beginning of Kubrik's 2001: A Space Odyssey, this movie seems just a few years in our future.

Everybody knows by now that the story is about an astronaut on a Mars exploration team who is left for dead when the remaining members of the team need to make an emergency evacuation due to a Martian "storm".  I personally find it difficult to believe that Martian storms of such extreme energy occur with that frequency.  (A professional--or semi-professional--analysis of the matter is available here.)

The movie has good writing; the writing for the Matt Damon character is especially good; it is very 21^st-century in its idiom, and has just the perfect blend of Matt Damon and Neil De Grasse Tyson.

What was most wonderful about this movie (the click-bait phrase would be "genius", or "unbelievable" or even "epic") is how it makes science so attractive.  To the youngest generation, "science" has come to mean cell-phones and GPS.  That's all well and good; it's small technology.  But it would be lovely to have a revival of spaceflight and space exploration, despite the problems of environment and energy usage.  The will to use our resources for conservation and human upliftment is nowhere to be found.  We may as well put people to work building rockets.  Heaven knows there's a need for employment.  The Final Frontier could still invigorate young people, and steer them away from unproductive areas of study such as marketing and business, towards engineering and aircraft design.

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