Ridley Scott's 'The Martian' (second review)

So determines NASA astronaut Mark Watney (Matt Damon) in Ridley Scott’s extraterrestrial epic The Martian, based on the book by Andy Weir. My BSR colleague, science writer Mark Wolverton, isn’t alone in giving The Martian’s factual foundation an overall thumbs-up.

Most Martian commentators focus on the fact that science and technology, however futuristic or belief-bending, are central to the story, driving the plot more than interpersonal drama does.

No funky chicken

If I have a scientific bone to pick with the movie, it’s that it robbed me of the chance to see Matt Damon do what military pilots sometimes call “the funky chicken.” As Watney (spoiler alert) blasts off from the surface of Mars and his cohorts aboard the space station above tell him to go ahead and pass out because he’s going to pull a sustained 12gs, the movie makes it look like this is no riskier than a good roller-coaster ride.

Passing out because of high g-forces is known as G-LOC, or gravity-induced loss of consciousness. Obviously, if you’re flying the plane, G-LOC can be fatal if you don’t wake up in time to regain control of your aircraft. Thus pilots and astronauts facing high gs in different axes of the human frame use a variety of techniques to cope, from specialized suits to breathing and muscle-straining techniques.

To understand why G-LOC happens in the vertical axis of a body blasting upward (the hydrostatic column if you want to get your biology on), imagine riding a centrifuge with your feet on the outside and your head near the middle. All the blood in your body would pool in your legs, and it’s lights out in the brain — cerebral hypoxia, for my fellow nerds.

High gs don’t kid around, as I learned when I rode the space-training centrifuge a few years ago. As you get over 3 or 4gs, you have to clench the muscles in your lower body and your throat as you breathe to help keep blood, and therefore oxygen, in your brain. High gs feel as if you suddenly gained at least 500 pounds. You can barely lift your own arms, they’re so heavy, and your flesh feels like it’s trying to peel away from your face.

In The Martian, Watney wakes up from G-LOC as if from a gentle sleep. That’s no fun nor is it accurate. People waking up from G-LOC give a distinctive convulsive jerk: You can see it in real life here.

I don’t want to complain that a movie about a manned mission to Mars takes scientific liberties — I just want to lodge my disappointment at not seeing Matt Damon act out the funky chicken. I agree the movie’s science is solid enough to suspend your disbelief.

Yay for the human species

But I would argue with Mark’s assessment that the movie plays up “reason, rationality, calm practicality, and plain old indomitable human courage” over sentimentality.

Did you watch the latter scenes of the movie, when thousands of people in the streets of New York stand around cheering like it’s New Year’s Eve and confetti rains down over them all as the movie’s climactic rescue is broadcast worldwide?

Many love The Martian as a paean to human loyalty, ingenuity, and collaboration. The idea of the whole world chipping in to rescue one person millions of miles away really makes us feel pretty good, as a species.

This fictional furor is a believable one — we can look at the true story of Apollo 13, or the saga of the Chilean miners who were trapped underground in 2010. Or the way a photo of a single drowned toddler galvanized the globe on Europe’s refugee crisis.

If one person really was stuck on Mars, we know we’d do absolutely anything to save him.

Science over sentimentality? Think again

For some reason, as perhaps the most highly social species on the planet, we have a strange psychological habit of crystallizing our empathy within individual stories, as if we can’t comprehend a crisis until it has a single human face, even as millions die in war or genocide or famine.

The debate over whether our dollars are well-spent on space missions, while Earthlings starve or die of cancer and HIV or go blind for lack of a little vitamin A, will never end. How many life-changing advances on Earth have come from the science of spaceflight?

But in a world where we ignore countless hungry people — many of them traumatized veterans of our own military — on the streets of our own city every day, there is something ridiculously sentimental about the idea of pouring our dollars and best brainpower into saving one man on another planet. Imagine what such a dedicated application of our resources could do for people dying or starving not just on some other continent of Earth, but our own hometowns.

It reminds me of the same illogical faith a growing number of Americans have in a couple of anecdotes about kids whose autism happened to manifest after their vaccinations, versus reams of studies proving that vaccines are safe and necessary. We so-called rational humans will flock to one compelling face over the facts any day, and we’ll glory in the fantasy of saving a single man on Mars over the things we could actually do to save millions of people dying right here on Earth.