Matt Damon is alone again, as reported on newyorker.com. In “Interstellar” last year he played an astronaut who was sent through a wormhole and ended up alone on a frozen planet. This year, in “The Martian,” he plays an astronaut named Mark Watney, who is marooned in a storm and left behind, alone, on the red planet. But, as it turns out, if you are stranded on a distant, lonely planet, Mark Watney is exactly the guy you want to be, said arstechnica.com, a technology website. After the initial, fast-paced introduction scene, we have all the time in the world, reported Anthony Lane in The New Yorker. Watney has four years to kill on his world before anyone can swing by to pick him up. So, how do you dramatize a waiting game? Director Ridley Scott, reported The New Yorker, rejoiced in the challenge of solitude. He is seventy-seven years old, yet the startling fact is that “The Martian” appears to be the work of a young man. “Ridley Scott is a very good filmmaker,” said Russel Carlson, professor of mathematics. “This movie reminds me a lot of Apollo 13. It was based on true events. Take this movie and beef it all up, raise the stakes, let [the protagonist] be left on the planet and you get Apollo 13 on steroids.” “The movie shows how to use all your strengths and intelligence to survive,” said Davisson Oliveira, a sophomore double majoring in computer science and information technology from Brazil. He said he could feel in Watney’s place, the depressing moments and the fear of dying tomorrow. “In this situation you might think more of dying than surviving.” Oliveira also said Watney has to overcome obstacles. “He was the botanist of the crew. So he said to himself, ‘I can grow food out of my poop.’ So he started to work,” he said this new movie is so light on its feet than anybody listening at the door of the theatre might think that there was a comedy playing inside, reported newyorker.com.“If I were stuck on Mars,” said Sarah Mitchell, an undeclared freshman from Alabama, “I guess I would grow plants as well, although I wouldn’t be successful as he was. It would be a comedy. The whole thing would be hilarious. I would just sit there laughing trying to grow crops.”Carlson praised the pace and narrative of the story as well. “They did a good job with the humor of lightening things up. It would be too depressing of a story without it.”Carlson further said, “The issue is you have a movie that needs a different kind of pacing than a book does. The brilliance in the movie is [it focuses more] on the character overcoming the obstacles than the obstacles themselves, what you can do in a book. In a movie you have to make the challenges stepping stones in the development of the character. Ridley Scott did a great job of pacing the movie, so that the challenges of the book he chose to include helped to develop [Watney]. He designed the movie around a movie’s strengths.”Arstechnica.com reported that Damon has never seemed more at home than he does here, millions of miles adrift. No other actor would have shouldered the weight of the role with such diligent grace. Carlson stated, “What they did brilliant in ‘The Martian’ is this development of character. I wished they made that with Superman instead of just making him dark.”Mitchell said, “I thought that I was going to hate the movie. It’s not my type of movie at all. At the beginning I thought it was really boring, but then I got really into it. I really liked the main character-- his perseverance and strength. He was willing to take risks. He was willing to jump out of a spaceship and possibly go off and never be found in space again. If he would have done it otherwise he wouldn’t have survived. I think if he just had sat back and wouldn’t have gone outside because he could be hurt he would have died. You have to take risks to make the most out of life.” “They did a really good job with the science,” said Carlson, despite the fact the author did all his research on the internet, according to arstechnica.com. Carlson also said, “When you want complex, unusual mathematical constructs that most mathematics professors don’t know anything about, you can go to Wikipedia, where everything is laid out beautifully. [Lane’s] science is really well grounded.” Uploaded Oct. 17, 2015
Writer: Eric Hachenberger
