Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch The Martian
2015 · Ridley Scott · The Martian on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch what Damon's face does whenever the news gets worse. (performance)
Watney sits in front of a fixed camera and talks like a comic working a room. Each time despair could settle, Damon reaches for a joke, and the joke turns into a plan. The wit reads as effort, not ease.
Payoff: Feeling never gets to stop the film. It converts into a task, and that conversion is the whole tonal design. In the reading: dicisign. The reading calls this a dicisign. You feel the camera Watney is addressing, a man filming himself in the act of thinking.
Look at the color change each time the film leaves Mars. (light)
Wolski gives each location a fixed palette. Mars is warm ochre. Houston is cool corporate fluorescence. The Hermes is sterile metallic blue-white. You always know which of the three stories you are in.
Payoff: The color scheme solves the film's biggest problem. Three simultaneous plots cross-cut for two hours without you ever losing your place.
Compare how wide the Mars shots are with the Hab shots. (camera)
Outside, Wolski shoots Watney low and small against empty red geology. Inside, the lenses tighten to close-ups and medium shots at a workbench. The film alternates between immensity and a table.
Payoff: Survival gets lived at close range. The wide shots tell you the size of the problem, the tight ones show you the work. In the reading: respiration-space. The reading calls this respiration-space, a film breathing between the huge milieu and the narrow line where the work actually happens.
Listen for disco and seventies pop playing inside the Hab. (sound)
Commander Lewis left her music collection behind, so Donna Summer and ABBA are the only entertainment on the planet. The songs play in the room rather than on the soundtrack, and they keep commenting on the situation sideways.
Payoff: Gregson-Williams keeps his score small so the pop can do the emotional work. Humor is survival equipment the film takes seriously.
Count the sols and watch a new problem arrive with each one. (structure)
The film advances by stating a problem, showing the fix, and revealing the next problem the fix created. Growing potatoes exposes a water problem. Digging up Pathfinder opens a communication problem. There is no reversal, just the next task.
Payoff: Each act uncovers another face of the planet. The structure is cumulative rather than escalating, which is why the film never turns grim. In the reading: action-image-small-form. The reading calls this the small form, where an act discloses a hidden piece of the situation, which then demands the next act.
Once you have seen it
Time how long a shot holds in each of the three locations. (cutting)
Scalia cuts Mars in longer takes, Houston at conference-room speed, and the Hermes slower and quieter. Three tempos running at once keep the strands from flattening each other, and they converge only at the rescue.
Payoff: Rhythm does what color does. Each strand keeps its own pace so the convergence at the end reads as an event.
Watch the Houston faces instead of the whiteboards. (performance)
Chastain, Daniels, Ejiofor, Wiig, Peña, and Bean are mostly given reaction and logistics. Scott uses them as witnesses. Their growing investment in Watney is how the film licenses yours without Watney ever asking for pity.
Payoff: Watney refuses to be a victim, so the emotion gets outsourced. Other people are allowed to feel what he will not.
Count how often a close-up cuts away to a task. (cutting)
On a second pass the ratio is obvious. Almost every time a feeling gathers on someone's face, Scott cuts to hands, a screen, a calculation. Even the rescue is staged as procedure before it is staged as reunion.
Payoff: That ratio is the movie. The film keeps choosing work over grief, and its optimism comes out of the cutting pattern.
Carry this in: Watch how fast the film turns a feeling into a task. That conversion happens in nearly every scene.