{"id":1432,"date":"2015-09-24T11:29:55","date_gmt":"2015-09-24T11:29:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/simonings.com\/?p=1432"},"modified":"2018-10-19T14:07:24","modified_gmt":"2018-10-19T14:07:24","slug":"i-love-what-i-do-and-im-really-good-at-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/?p=1432","title":{"rendered":"\u201cI love what I do and I\u2019m really good at it\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"martian\"<\/a><\/p>\n

No matter how far he runs,\u00a0Matt Damon cannot escape the attentions of New Scientist<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Towards the end of Ridley Scott\u2019s\u00a0The Martian<\/a><\/i>, marooned NASA astronaut Mark Watney (played by Matt Damon) says goodbye to the habitat that has kept him alive for more than 500 days. As he enters the airlock to leave, he pauses, turns \u2013 and there, on a table, is his space helmet. Sourly, he snatches it up: he has nearly gone and killed himself again.<\/p>\n

Set about 30 years in the future,\u00a0The Martian<\/i>\u00a0tells the story of how Watney survives at the very cusp of death, at which every trivial error, every moment of forgetfulness, will kill him in about 35 seconds. Jeopardy is the stuff of adventure movies. What makes all this different is its remarkable lack of interest in what jeopardy feels like \u201cinside\u201d, and its loving depiction of how people should deal with it.<\/p>\n

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The film is based on a story by\u00a0Andy Weir<\/a>, a software engineer and self-confessed geek who ignored traditional publishers in favour of a blog through which he could work out technical solutions to Watney\u2019s problems. Watney has been left for dead on Mars without enough food and water to survive until the next mission \u2013 due in four years\u2019 time.\u00a0But there is much more to it than that.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Before he shot his last scene at the Korda Filmpark, outside Budapest in Hungary, CultureLab caught up with Damon, who was tasked with conveying what it would be like to\u00a0survive for 18 months<\/a>\u00a0only on potatoes grown in your own faeces. He explained: \u201cRidley and I agreed\u00a0The Martian<\/i>\u00a0is not one of those existential survival movies. Neither is it just a popcorn kind of whizz-bang, he\u2019s-never-really-in-danger type of experience. The key is to have the audience feel the enormity without it seeming ponderous. And it has to be funny, because Watney and his colleagues are capable of doing really dangerous things and having a good sense of humour about them.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n
No wonder NASA got behind the film: its tale of the administration\u2019s daring, unsanctioned bid to rescue one of their own gives every department a hero. But where\u00a0The Martian<\/i>\u00a0gets interesting is in its refusal to take heroism at face value. Watney survives because he is smart and knowledgeable, can get by without company and likes the sound of his own voice; and because coming up with a strong, snarky one-liner can make his whole day. He survives because, as he says in a message meant for his parents, \u201cI love what I do and I\u2019m really good at it.\u201d<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

This distillation of NASA\u2019s philosophy is endorsed by Ellen Ochoa, director of the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, who praised Weir\u2019s book for encapsulating aspects of mission training. \u201cIt is a very realistic scenario of what we go through when we train crew members and flight controllers, who must quickly analyse a situation and prioritise tasks,\u201d she said. She added that resilience is \u201cprobably the single most important characteristic to have as an explorer, and Watney proves to be extraordinarily resilient\u201d.<\/p>\n

The film\u2019s whole approach favours accuracy over visual bombast. Less spectacular than Alfonso Cuar\u00f3n\u2019s\u00a0Gravity\u00a0<\/a><\/i>(2013), and a lot less silly than Christopher Nolan\u2019s\u00a0Interstellar<\/a><\/i>\u00a0(2014),\u00a0The Martian<\/i>\u00a0has exploited NASA\u2019s enthusiasm well, conjuring up habitats, spacesuits, spacecraft and launch vehicles that carry its stamp of approval.<\/p>\n

Is\u00a0The Martian<\/i>\u00a0a nerd thriller? For sure: you can\u2019t have Damon declaring he will \u201chave to science the shit out of this\u201d and not find yourself moving your biros to your shirt pocket. But it\u2019s more than a love letter to science. It is an entertaining depiction of a way of behaving that keeps people alive in extreme circumstances: love your job; embrace the little you can do and do it; like it or not, death is always coming, so to hell with it. This, more than any amount of Mars-mission razz, is the real heart of\u00a0The Martian<\/i>, the source of its optimism, and a quality deserving of praise.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

No matter how far he runs,\u00a0Matt Damon cannot escape the attentions of New Scientist   Towards the end of Ridley Scott\u2019s\u00a0The Martian, marooned NASA astronaut Mark Watney (played by Matt Damon) says goodbye to the habitat that has kept him … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[78,620],"tags":[180,222],"class_list":["post-1432","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews-and-opinion","category-screen","tag-film","tag-mars"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1432","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1432"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1432\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2422,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1432\/revisions\/2422"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1432"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1432"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1432"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}