Why I was disappointed in "The Martian"

[Vort]

Because Ridley Scott made Blade Runner, which means he's supposed to grok the fundamental aspects of his story and tell it compellingly. Instead, we get what amounts to a paint-by-numbers rendition of a book that was rich in compelling story but somewhat short in authentic emotion. That's the hole Scott should have been filling. Instead, we get great CGI telling an obvious tale.

 

Or maybe it's simpler than that. Maybe I just disliked the filthy gutter language that permeated this movie.

 

SPOILER ALERT

Not sure why I'm unhappy about this movie. I didn't hate it. Well, not as a whole. The one thing I absolutely, unequivocally hated about it was the profanity. Completely unnecessary. A huge distraction from the plot, included for people who enjoy bathing in raw sewage. (And judging from the guffaws around me, there are a lot of such people.) Two or three F-words spoken for maximum effect, two in the first minutes of the movie, and several other clearly implied F-words, including obvious lip-readings of Matt Damon and some lightly disguised emails. And lots of S-words and other filth, just for effect.

 

And for what purpose? It adds nothing of value. That alone makes me almost wish I hadn't gone.

 

I confess, I was also pretty disappointed at the looseness of the "science" involved. The book was hard SF, where "hard" means "not soft and squishy with things like space portals and suspended animation and matter transporters and warp drive and all the other silly stuff you find in space opera." And The Martian did indeed lack that stuff. But it also lacked something else: Scientific rigor. You don't have to be a physics major to see the gaping holes. I can't even remember them all; I was wishing I had brought a pen and a piece of paper to write them all down. I was totally surprised by how many such scientific stupidities there were. Here are a few that I can remember off the top of my head:

• The Martian dust storm. Um, folks, the Martian atmosphere is less than 1% as dense as Earth's. Even if you were in a 200-mph wind storm, you would barely feel it. In a space suit, you might not feel it at all. You would notice all the superfine dust being blown around, of course, but I doubt the wind would be perceptible. It would not blow you around, and it would not tip your rocket over. That is just plain absurd. (To be fair to Scott, I believe that this was actually in the book, as well.)
   
• Sound on Mars. With air that thin, you would hear basically almost nothing. Instead, in shots on Mars external to the habitat, the movie sounds like you're on Earth.
   
• Weight. Matt Damon is straining hard to shovel that Martian dirt. Problem is, Mars' gravity is only a bit over a third of Earth's. Yes, it may be hard work to shovel in a space suit, but the whole weight thing was all messed up. Even the way he walked wasn't right.
   
• Air pressure in general. The whole concept apparently escaped both Scott and the screenwriters. The explosion of the entry port was reasonable -- and in fact was one of the few times when the air pressure effects were shown anywhere near realistically. The biggest howler (there were a few) was when Matt Damon's character fixed the enormous, gaping hole in his habitat left by the aforementioned explosion by duct taping some plastic sheeting over it. At this point, anyone who cared a whit about realistic SF was shaking their heads and wondering if it was a good time to go get popcorn.
  
  Let's do a very, very rough calculation. Let's approximate the hole as circular and, oh, seven feet across, so a radius of 3.5 feet, or 42 inches. The area of that hole is then
  
  A = πr²
  = π(42 in)²
  = about 5500 square inches
  
  Let's say the habitat was pressurized to 10 pounds per square inch. (Normal pressure at sea level is 14.7 pounds per square inch; in Salt Lake, maybe 12 or 12.5 pounds per square inch. So 10 is thin air. Not sure what is realistic -- 10 might be too low -- but it's a good approximation.) Then (10 pounds per square inch) x (5500 square inches) = 55,000 pounds.
  
  That is to say: 55,000 pounds of force on that sheet of plastic, duct-taped over the hole. Where both the plastic sheeting and the duct tape held.
  
  Uh-huh.
  
  Then, not thirty seconds later, we see one of the ferocious Martian storms raging outside (at 1/200th the pressure of Earth's atmosphere), and the plastic sheeting is...flapping in the wind. At one point, the plastic sheet bubbling outward actually inverts!
  
  Friends, hear me. This is not "hard" SF. There is no more science in that than in the Starship Enterprise or X-wing fighter whooshing by the camera in the vacuum of space.
   
• Another one that I can't really blame on Scott, because it was in the book: Once the astronaut's farm was destroyed by the vacuum of the Martian atmosphere, he was condemned to starve because, you see, all the bacteria were destroyed (even though most of them had been exposed to nothing more lethal than a vacuum). So now they were all irretrievably dead, with no possible way to get them back.
  
  Um...except that he could just heat the dirt back up and thaw it out, and even in the unlikely event that none of the bacteria did survive, he could just poop on it again and wait a week for the bacteria to repopulate the soil.
  
  This guy's a botanist, and he can't figure that out himself?

But in the final analysis, I think it was the over-the-top cursing that ruined the movie for me. I could have enjoyed a paint-by-numbers rendition of the book, and could even have overlooked the scientific head-bangers, as long as I didn't have to hear the non-stop filthy language. (And, frankly, watching Matt Damon walk buck-naked away from us didn't do a thing for me. Maybe I should just be glad he wasn't walking toward us.)

 

In the end, I can't give a thumbs up, enthusiastic or otherwise, to this movie. I'm very sorry to say that. It was entertaining and, to a degree, enjoyable. But I would not want to see it again, and I definitely would not want my children to see it (or hear it). They get more than enough of that at school and elsewhere; no need to pay good money for it.

Edited November 2, 2015 by Vort

[Ironhold]

Science site Citadel of Myths has an ongoing discussion about the film and its scientific merits in its forum; you might want to have a look at it. I'm there under the same username.

At the time the original book was written, storms like that on Mars were a concern because it was believed that they'd still be at something resembling full Earth power; it wasn't until after the book came out that NASA discovered the fear was baseless. As far as the bacteria goes, it wasn't just the vacuum, but the cold that did it; they froze to death.

As far as the cursing goes, you'd be surprised what people spout off in a survival situation.

[Guest]

Finally!  I gave up waiting for this review thinking you decided not to watch it after I told you about the filthy language...

 

You didn't disappoint, Vort!