I won't beat around the bush, Ridley Scott's The Martian is excellent. It's exhilarating, heartfelt, and surprisingly hilarious. But what really makes it stand out is that the film pulls off a feat I thought was almost impossible. It's a hard science fiction story that doesn't get bogged down in minutiae and over-explanation.
Hard science fiction is a term for sci-fi stories that stick as closely as possible to actual science. They're rather rare in terms of film, but we've seen a few more pop up in recent years. Notably fellow "I'm stuck in space, please help" story Gravity and the other subject of my article, Interstellar. Interstellar got a ton of hype before its release for its fidelity to science but its story flopped on its face. And it flopped for the exact opposite reason that The Martian succeeds, it failed to make the science matter in human terms.
Here's the thing, I know scientific accuracy sounds impressive for a science fiction story. It's a sign to the audience that the people telling and making the story care about what they're doing, and it buys into the fallacy that "realism" makes a story inherently superior. But how accurate the science is doesn't really matter unless it actually plays some part in the story, unless you make the science work in terms of the story. This is why Neil Degrasse Tyson or whoever don't care that the faster-than-light travel in Star Trek is physically impossible, because it has nothing to do with the story. But the adherence to real-world science works for The Martian, because book writer Andy Weir and screenwriter Drew Goddard use the actual problems a human would have surviving on Mars to create drama. They make the science work for the story, not the other way around.
Which brings me back to Interstellar. Christopher Nolan and co. were unable to put the science into their story in an organic way. They had clearly done a lot of research and Nolan's trademark commitment to cinematic realism realizes the astronomical phenomenon beautifully, but it doesn't work for the story they're telling. None of the weird space stuff McConaughey and his astronauts go through connects with the overall story of his relationship with his daughter. In fact, what drama the hard science creates in Interstellar is artificial. Propped up to keep the audience's attention.
It doesn't help that the stakes of the story in Interstellar are ridiculously big. Their quest to find a new planet gets bogged down in talk of wormholes, time dilation, and fifth-dimensional space. This is a huge mistake when it comes to hard sci-fi stories. Cosmos-esque physics and similar big ideas are challenging enough on their own to understand, so to make the stakes and consequences also so hugely abstract disconnects the audience. The story takes place on terms they can't relate to. This is the other smart thing The Martian does. The stakes of the story and the motivations are clear, simple, and relatable. Matt Damon is stuck on Mars and he needs to get home, which is really hard. So all the science and minutiae is framed in terms of how is Matt Damon going to stay alive and how is it going to get him off Mars. By keeping it grounded in the story like that, the audience stays connected and cares about how the science works because they understand what it means in human terms.
The point is, scientific accuracy doesn't make a story better. It's how you use that science to tell a story that matters.
