Originally self-published on the author’s website one chapter at a time, Andy Weir’s novel The Martian is set to become a feature film directed by Ridley Scott and starring Matt Damon later this year. Rejected by numerous publishers, and spurred by an energetic grass-roots fan base, Weir’s determination to see his science fiction tale told resulted in it becoming the top-selling e-book of that literary genre of 2011. Eventually, Crown Publishing landed the print rights—which they used to release a hardcover edition of The Martian in 2014—and Twentieth Century Fox optioned the film rights and attached Damon to the project to play the titular role.
Perhaps the movie studio giant heard that Christopher Nolan already had Mr. Damon in a space suit for his surprise appearance in last fall’s Interstellar?
Either way, the film version of The Martian—co-starring Jessica Chastain, Jeff Daniels, and Kristen Wiig—has been garnering a decent amount of pre-release buzz. Earlier this week, the first trailer for the movie dropped and already has over 8 million views:
To prepare for the movie’s release, I greedily consumed Andy Weir’s book in the span of 72 hours last weekend.
Here’s the premise: In the not-too-distant future, during a manned mission to the planet Mars, the crew of a United States spaceship are besieged by a violent dust storm on the red planet’s surface. All but the crew’s botanist (and resident mechanical engineer) Mark Watney make it off in time. No one knows that Watney is still alive and Watney begins an 18-month ordeal of survival the likes of which no human being has ever experienced.
It’s Robinson Crusoe meets Apollo 13, with a sprinkling of Cast Away and The Right Stuff mixed in for good measure. It is riveting. It is exciting. And depending on how Ridley Scott—who has undeniably lost a step in recent years (see: Prometheus)—handles the long stretches of isolation Mark Watney experiences on Mars, it should be a big winner at the box office come November.
In the book, Weir combines a compelling narrative with specific, scientific detail. The son of a particle physicist, with a background in computer science, Andy Weir knows the science in “science fiction.” Typically, storytellers utilizing this genre either blow right past such details or do a poor job of making the technical jargon accessible to non-scientists.
As well, although The Martian is a search-and-rescue story, its protagonists are regular men and women who are forced by circumstances to achieve incredible things. They possess no supernatural powers, save those gifted by the genetic lottery and their own hard work. There is nothing for them to rely on beyond human ingenuity and grit.
The Martian is simply about a smart kid from Chicago who gets the chance to travel to parts of the known universe that few have seen and who must find his way home. His resourcefulness is remarkable. His fate rests in the hands of other human beings. There are no vampires. There are no mystical armadas of invading aliens. It is man vs. wild. But on Mars.
And it is precisely this lack of supernatural derring-do that makes the story so compelling. Hollywood does itself a disservice when it ignores the power of a story (like Apollo 13) where humans work to save other humans. The films that do embrace the human—such as Interstellar or the re-booted Star Trek movies—draw legions of fans, even among those who claim to prefer the kinds of films that feature superheroes in spandex. There is virtue in human-centered science fiction. Hollywood should make more of it.
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