The Martian v. First Man…
[Note from Steve: Not exactly a movie review…or is it a review of two?]
While I reviewed Andy Weir’s book (Oct. 16, 2015), I don’t think I reviewed the movie with Matt Damon, which I saw (readers can confirm that by perusing the movie review archive—I couldn’t find one). I’m sure I won’t see First Man. Ryan Gosling can’t compare to everyman Matt Damon, but that’s not the main point of this article. My intention is to compare the focus of these two movies.
Although The Martian is clearly fiction, both movies are fictional, the second being historical fiction, of course. They’re both about space exploration, the first about exploring Mars and the second about exploring Luna. That’s where the similarities end.
First Man focuses on the past, namely astronaut Neil Armstrong. It’s a screen biopic. Nothing against Armstrong, who has been made into a folk hero, but it’s the focus on the past that bothers me. The U.S. government has all but destroyed NASA. They shut down the shuttle program and didn’t replace it. We’ve been forced to pay Russia to haul our astronauts to the ISS. Now that Russia’s rockets are having problems (the last one failed and came close to killing a cosmonaut and astronaut), we are basically excluded from manned spaceflight for the present. All of this is due to ill-advised budget cutting by various administrations, and public opinion seems to have gone along with it, saying we can no longer afford space exploration. Many of us have shed a few tears—space is the last frontier, and our pioneering spirit is dead!
A similar thing happened to the SSC (“Superconducting Super Collider”), cancelled by Congress. We have ceded our lead in space exploration to the Europeans and Russia; we have ceded our lead in particle physics to the Europeans (CERN). Per capita, other countries are spending far more on non-military R&D than the U.S. Worse, that parallels huge U.S. increases in military R&D.
All that looks backward at an ignoble past where past glories are forgotten as scientific research takes a back seat. Sure, it was great to step on the moon in 1969, but can we swallow the bitter pill of knowing we couldn’t reproduce that feat now, even if there was a desire to do so?
The Martian has a more positive outlook. Forget about the moon. Let’s look to Mars and beyond. While the book and the movie still tells the tale of budget-cutting bureaucrats fighting those who want scientific progress, it shows that a few plucky heroes can still get it done! The Martian is positive and First Man is negative exactly for those reasons.
Of course, Weir’s story suffers the same failings as Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea. The latter has pages and pages of narrative about undersea flora and fauna. Excess narrative is characteristic of many 19th century novels, from Moby Dick to Pride and Prejudice, and it’s damn boring. Weir’s narrative is too—worse than a manual for turning whale blubber into lamp oil (Moby Dick), it’s a manual for growing potatoes in human excrement.
But The Martian looks forward in a positive way that First Man can never do. That makes a big difference. Both movies are sad. First Man looks sadly back at NASA’s glory days. The Martian sadly reminds us of what might have been if our leaders weren’t so stupid. Yet looking forward is always better than looking backward. We can’t change the past, but maybe we can change the future? You don’t have to see either movie to make a choice here.
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Comments are always welcome!
More than Human: The Mensa Contagion. One reviewer compared this novel to Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars series. The first part is about how an ET virus creates homo sapiens version 2.0 on Earth, though. The second is about how these new humans colonize Mars and discover a starship of ETs who sent the virus to Earth. The ebook is available on Amazon and Smashwords and all its affiliates.
In libris libertas!
November 13th, 2018 at 11:34 am
I recently caught part of The Martian on HBO or one of the movie networks and watched it until the end. The ending was pretty exciting, I thought.
But I share your disappointment and sadness at the way we’ve handled our space program. Too many wars to fund. Is there an analogy in past explorations? Like, the Romans didn’t fund the discovery of the new world? Etc etc? We seem to have plenty of money to fund the military and to make war all over the world, but not enough to take care of our own people, let alone advance science. Makes me want to cry.
November 13th, 2018 at 12:28 pm
Scott, I neglected to mention the Elon Musk-flavored Mars series (second season just started on…National Geo?). A lot of it is more boring than growing potatoes in human feces. Maybe the real colonization of Mars will just show there’s not much excitement in doing it? I hope not. In fiction, we can skip the boring details at least, Mark Weir notwithstanding.
Funding science hasn’t been just a low priority for the current U.S. administration. The E.U. is about the size of the U.S. in population, and they did OK by CERN. It can be done if we’re motivate to do it. And we don’t need a space race with the USSR to do it.
r/Steve
November 14th, 2018 at 11:56 am
I didn’t mean to imply that it’s limited to Trump’s administration, though it feels like this one is particularly bad for science. Other administrations at least paid lip service to it and funded some stuff like the Mars rovers and robotic space exploration. It’s been a thing for a while now. Too much war for a long time.
My son is taking a physics course at FermiLab. They’re doing some cool stuff with shooting neutrinos at a target in Minnesota. But it feels ‘small.’ I agree that they could be doing much bigger and cooler things. But I think there is such a resentment of science among “normal” people and there is no national will to do cool science.
November 14th, 2018 at 12:42 pm
Knew that. It was a clarification for the blog readers.
Met Leon Lederman in Mexico (ex-director of Fermilab). One of our students participated in an experiment there. Once the place to be, but SSC’s demise ended particle physics in the U.S. (that student was going to work there–he worked on PET devices instead, and has several patents).
Of course, we can participate in experiments at CERN, but the U.S. no longer has the lead in particle physics.
Yes, “normal people” often distrust science, if not outright attack it. Combined with politicians’ myopia, STEM students will have a tough time. Sad.
r/Steve