Another Clip From The Martian

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See this movie I must!

With only meager supplies, he must draw upon his ingenuity, wit and spirit to subsist and find a way to signal to Earth that he is alive. Millions of miles away, NASA and a team of international scientists work tirelessly to bring “the Martian” home, while his crewmates concurrently plot a daring, if not impossible rescue mission. As these stories of incredible bravery unfold, the world comes together to root for Watney’s safe return.

 

[Thanks to David K.M. Klaus for the link.]

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6 thoughts on “Another Clip From The Martian”

  1. From where I sit, this feels like the first mis-step tonally in their promotion of this movie.

    Very Armaggeddon-ish – and while I enjoy Armageddon, that’s not the feels I expect from The Martian.

  2. posmaster:

    From where I sit, this feels like the first mis-step tonally in their promotion of this movie.

    I agree. To some extent I felt the same way, despite liking the scenario itself.

    There also seems to be (in my mind) a tipping point where advertising has shown too much of the movie, and that may also be part of my reaction.

  3. I think it will probably work better within the context of the film. The way the book is written, we don’t really get to see too much of this, because it’s tightly focused on Watney on the one hand and the NASA team on the other. The movie is a different medium, and will have a bit of a different focus.

    When you get right down to it, after all, this is just an illustration of one of the more powerful passages from the book, a passage which has also been repurposed as a narration in one of the other trailers:

    But really, they did it because every human being has a basic instinct to help each other out. It might not seem that way sometimes, but it’s true.

    If a hiker gets lost in the mountains, people will coordinate a search. If a train crashes, people will line up to give blood. If an earthquake levels a city, people all over the world will send emergency supplies. This is so fundamentally human that it’s found in every culture without exception. Yes, there are assholes who just don’t care, but they’re massively outnumbered by the people who do. And because of that, I had billions of people on my side.

    And given that the movie is such an unlikely contender, I can’t blame them for pushing it as much as they can. After all, it’s from Ridley Scott, who hasn’t had a mega-hit in years, based on a first-time self-published novel from someone whose previous big claim to fame was for doing one of the earliest webcomics which nobody even remembers anymore.

    I was checking local movie listings in my area (heh, I Freudian-typed “ares” there) to see if the movie was playing in IMAX at the local IMAXplex. And it wasn’t. Instead there was some movie called Everest that I’d never heard of (but was apparently about a disaster on a mountain, rather than Mars), whereas The Martian got 3D and regular screens only. Really, I was kind of stunned; this movie deserves IMAX screening, but they only do one (at most, occasionally two) movie(s) a week that way and this wasn’t it.

    So yeah, I can hardly blame them for getting behind it and pushing as hard as they can. I just hope the movie itself lives up to the push as well as the book did.

  4. I’m going to go a step farther and say this seems so much a “feel-good” movie that I could puke. Not a single glimpse of the spaceship or Mars, just a lot of uninteresting happy people waving flags and radiating good-will like crazy. Maybe it is just a mistaken promotional angle … or maybe its a shrewd calgulation that “feel good” is what the general public wants and Mars is only what geeks want.

  5. I liked it, but then I read the book, what, two days ago? So I could imagine exactly when this stuff happens. I think it will be much more powerful within the context of the film. It was a feel-good book so some feel-good in the film is expected. 🙂

  6. I think that everything we’ve seen from the marketing is the attempt to put butts into theater seats (“Get him home”, etc, etc), and I can’t blame them for pitching it that way. I think we’ll finally see the nuts & bolts of the story when we get our own butts into those seats this weekend. I’ve been geeking hard for this story since I read it just after Christmas.
    It’s funny, I’m the only family member who read the book, but the movie marketing has been working overtime for my wife, who is not particularly inclined to this type of movie, but she really wants to see it as much as me or our daughter, who never got the book onto her busy schedule before she headed off to college.

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