Movie Discussion: The Martian

Scott Hardie | October 18, 2015
Kelly is struggling with whether to see this. She has a mild claustrophobia that acts up when movies confine their characters to tiny spaces (Buried would be torture for her), and Gravity felt claustrophobic to her, with shots right inside Sandra Bullock's spacesuit that made it feel like she was going to suffocate in there. She's afraid that The Martian could be another Gravity. Should she skip it?

Scott Hardie | March 19, 2016
Verdict: Not claustrophobic at all. There's a couple of scenes of Matt Damon nearly suffocating in his spacesuit, but they're filmed from the outside. Most of Damon's scenes are filmed in his habitat tent or vehicle, and nearly half of the movie is spent on the teams at NASA trying to bring him home, so this was not difficult to watch at all, except perhaps for the impalement surgery at the beginning.

I was surprised at how quickly it thrust us into the stranded-Damon story with no time spent introducing the characters. I'm always intrigued when a movie jumps right into the main plot from the very first scene, because it implies that there's a lot more story to come and it doesn't have any time to waste. That was true here.

My favorite trivia about the movie: Donald Glover slipping and falling on the coffee, then getting up and continuing on with pouring another cup, was not planned. The actor really did slip and fall out of frame and get up and continue with the scene, and they left it in.