Had to watch The Martian today and discovered I liked it quite a bit. You couldn’t make it today: it’s very optimistic-early-2010s, premised as it is on the idea of civilization and progress as anything but a hateful, maddening farce etc etc. But I liked it.
I can tell I would’ve liked the book more; the video-log device was illogical compared to a text journal, and a lot of the macgyvery scenes felt more perfunctory than fun.
Features Donald Glover giving the most convincing imitation of an actual physicist-nerd I’ve seen on film – which is to say, very realistic in mannerisms and so forth but hobbled by a script that demands a bunch of embarassing Dr. House nonsense.
Also grading on a Hollywood curve it did a pretty good job of not looking like a Vanity Fair photoshoot, apart from Kate Mara sticking out like a sore thumb as one of the astronauts.
Visually moving. Conveyed a feeling, which is all you can really ask of a movie. Watch this instead of Interstellar.
I had a slightly different take on it. To me The Martian is less “naive sci-fi optimism” and more “wish-fulfillment competence porn” a la House or Sherlock: smart people being good at their jobs, as escapism from the clusterfuck of idiocy that is the real world. Except that Watney is merely a smart normal person, instead of an insufferable genius, so it’s actually enjoyable to watch. That’s why I was at first a little confused by your “you couldn’t make it today”… it only came out three years ago! But competence porn, although taking some well-deserved beatings, is still alive and kicking (viz. Rick and Morty) more so than Arthur C. Clarke-esque optimism, and I think that explains it.
(Where I absolutely agree with you is that it’s a much better film than Interstellar)
The book is a breezy read though, so I would recommend it even if you can’t sink a huge time investment into a novel right now. Watney is not at all introspective or meditative, which might be a strike against the book’s literary merits but definitely makes it move fast. It’s definitely not going to be placed on a pedestal of “literary sci-fi”, but it’s a fun way to kill an afternoon.
I think competence porn is absolutely compatible with techno-optimism. The dated-feeling optimism in the movie is its fundamentally positive (almost naive) worldview: that space travel is a noble and worthy endeavor, that we should root for an iconic individual to be rescued at great cost, that powerful countries would work together towards a common goal, that the world would be transfixed in empathy for a powerful person’s suffering, that civilization as we know at will continue into the indefinite future and that that could be a good thing, etc.
Let’s put it this way: to make a movie like this is incompatible with loathing Elon Musk. Hence, its moment is in the past.
The book sounds good and I’ll probably check it out.
y’all onto things, it’s weird I never saw anyone drawing the obvious comparison between The Martian and earlier colonialist competence porn like Robinson Crusoe or Swiss Family Robinson