Hello, welcome to the Decipher podcast.
I'm here with my great friend Wendy Neither.
And we're here to talk about a little movie called The Martian,
one of my favorites. And I know it's one of yours
too, Wendy. Yeah, absolutely.
And you know, we're not talking about the the TV series The
Martian from way before that, starring the one and only Mr.
Hand. No, this is the 2015 movie based
on the book by Andy Weir. That's right.
Yes, we're no, not my favorite Martian.
Not any other Martians. The Martian, right.
Exactly, based on, as you said, Wendy, based on like one of the
best books I, I've read in a long time.
I, we were talking before we started recording.
I read the book after I saw the movie 'cause I, I guess the book
was kind of a phenomenon, like right around, like it was
published as a serial, which is kind of a cool thing.
He was publishing chapters as he wrote them then.
Yeah. So he was publishing the
chapters on his blog and kind of, I don't know what the time
frame was, but just kind of sporadically writing because he
had a day job. He's a software developer.
So he was just writing when he could and publishing chapters.
And eventually somebody, he, he collected it all and published
it I think as like a Amazon Kindle ebook.
And then very quickly a publisher got in touch and said,
hey, this is great, let's get you a publishing deal.
And then he got a movie deal like within a week, some, you
know, some of the option the the right.
So that is not how that usually works.
Yeah, yeah. At all, you know, so I know
you've read the book. Yes, yeah, read it several
times. I am trying to remember.
No, I I read the book before I saw the movie, and I just
watched it again this week with my oldest.
Yeah, yeah. We revisited everything we
enjoyed so much. It's so great.
I mean, the having seen the movie before I read the book,
you kind of you do the thing where you're just comparing the
two and you do that if you read the book beforehand too.
But based on like the behind the scenes stuff I've seen and, and
everything I've read about it, it looks like they just took his
book and put it into screenplay form and that and shot it.
You know, there was not a lot of changes from the book itself.
You know, the story obviously is, is all right there.
I think there's some minor character changes and things
like that. But mostly it's just you wrote a
great story. We're just going to go shoot it.
Yeah. And I think due to the the
layers of technical detail in there, you, you really can't
mess with that without, you know, having a lot of complaints
from the technically accurate people.
It's so true. Scientists will absolutely be
the first ones to yes shake a fist a lot like security people.
If you get something wrong, they'd love to tell you about
it. We both know that I, I know it
very well. So we both grew up at a time
when the US had a functioning space program, which was really
cool. It was, you're a couple years
older than I am, but I remember, you know, the late 70s, early
80s, you know, the 80s was kind of the space shuttle era.
You know, we were launching space shuttles every other year.
It seemed like actually kind of every year for a while.
And I remember it really well. It was like one of the defining
kind of features of American culture at the time.
You know, the space program, like the moon landing was very
much a recent memory, you know, 1969.
So like late 70s, early 80s, people were like, sure, I
remember that. And, you know, this is just what
we do. We go and do cool shit in space
and we don't, I mean, we still do some cool space stuff, but
it's not like this, you know, this is, this is a, a kind of a
little bit of a fantasy of like we've already put people on
Mars. They're, you know, working
really hard doing cool science stuff.
And it doesn't look like we're doing that, we're doing that
anytime soon. Yeah, Yeah, it's true.
And, you know, reading all of the commentary on no, nobody's
going to live on on Mars because of the radiation or, you know,
they're not going to be able to travel there or, you know, all,
all the different reasons why it won't work.
And I'm kind of like, you know, just let me have my fantasy for
a minute. I.
Completely agree. If you look at like the
compressed time frame of when the first, you know, unmanned
spacecraft went up, then manned spacecraft and then we, you
know, the US landed on the moon. It was not a long, you know, the
Russians put somebody in space and then like within 10 years we
had a man on the moon like that. We we used to do things in this
world. Yeah, well, you know, we we had
somebody to race, so we did. And it was kind of the Age of
heroes, you know, all of the, the, the test pilots, the the
crazy, crazy ones who pushed the envelope all all over the place,
the ones with the right stuff. If you read that book and they
just, you know, pivoted and went into spaceflight.
And, you know, we were ready to to watch them have those
adventures too. I remember when for the moon
landing, my dad went out and got our very first color TV and, you
know, so he set it up in the living room.
We were so excited and what do you know, the signal from the
moon was in black and white. Thanks Dad, but.
Yeah. That's awesome.
I love that story. That's so good.
We I think we've talked about this before, both of our fathers
or scientists. I know your dad is like quite a
noted figure. If people don't know, I'll give.
I'm more than happy to give you a chance to brag about your dad
if you want to. But my dad was a physicist as
well and did all kinds of cool stuff that I've talked a little
bit about. But tell the people a little bit
about like, your dad's background and how much of a
part of your your life that science was.
Oh boy. Well my dad served in World War
2. I think he kind of lied about
his age to do it, but he did it. And then he came home and went
back to college and, and he got ABA in English.
And then he was, he was hired as a nuclear physicist at a nuclear
facility 'cause, you know, that there was no certification for
stuff like that back then. So he did that like, you know,
memorizing and calculating using Enrico Fermi's equations in his
head in the middle of the night and, and stuff like that.
He went and then he invented some some testing equipment.
He wrote one of the first Fortran compilers and then he
decided to become an astronomer. So he did that for the rest of
his career. And so with him as an example,
you know, he never gave me a hard time about, well, I don't
know what I want to do. I think I'll just go try this.
Yeah, and it's such a great, I mean, that's a great lesson for
anybody. But that kind of art that you
just described of like, yeah, I went to college, I studied
English. But like, there's lots of cool
stuff happening in over here in this science world that I'm
interested in. And as you said, like that was
at the beginning of the nuclear age where like we didn't have
nuclear physicists, like we we didn't have a whole, you know,
cohort of trained people doing this stuff.
So you could just like raise your hand and be like, I want
to, can I do that? Like I'm smart.
Let me give, let me give it a shot.
Which is really cool. I mean, that's it's very close
to like my dad's kind of art too.
Like he was, he studied physics in college, but then went into
the army and was stationed in Huntsville, AL for a while.
And his time there overlapped with Wernher von Braun and that
whole cohort of German scientists who had we had
brought over after World War 2. And I don't think he worked
directly with von Braun, but he was there at the same time
working on different projects, worked on ballistic missile
defense and stuff tangentially related to the space program.
But this stuff was such a huge part of my childhood.
Just knowing that like there were people that, you know, like
my dad and people he worked with that were doing this kind of
work, you know, it was like, yeah, they were super cool.
But it wasn't like, you know, pie in the sky.
Like this stuff. It, it was like realistic work.
You know, we were just going and doing this stuff.
Yeah, yeah. And everybody, everybody knew,
you know, when they were working those fields, you know, they,
they knew all the players. Everybody knew each other.
Wasn't that a community back then?
Very true. The other thing that was a big
part of, I think both of our childhoods was movies about
space. You know, this is kind of that
arrow, you know, seventies, 80s, when it seemed like just about
80% of the movies that were in the theaters at all times were
some kind of space epic or science fiction.
Movie. Yeah, it's true.
Now, I was, I did one of these podcasts a couple weeks ago with
Wade Baker and Rich Mogul about Star Wars and, you know,
obviously a Seminole movie for a lot of people of our generation.
But there were just so many of these in the 80s and then we
kind of stopped doing that. But The Martian, which came out
I think 11 years ago now, like 2015.
Yeah, kind of brought it back in a big way because it was.
Yeah, it's a it's a space movie and there's a lot of science,
science and a small bit of science fiction involved, but
it's also just a very human story of this guy is in a really
bad situation and he's got to figure it out, you know, he's.
Got to science the shit out of it.
That's exactly right. Now the epitome of a hacker if
if ever there was 1. That's right.
That's exactly why I wanted to do this movie, because it's the
whole entire encapsulation of the hacker mindset of like, I've
got a thorny problem in in front of me, or maybe a series of
them, and I have to figure this out on my own.
I might get a little bit of help from the outside at some point,
but I've got to take these tools that I have at my disposal,
figure out how to repurpose them and solve this series of
problems so that I don't die in one of them any number of
horrible ways up here, you know? Scooging things together and I
love that. It's realistic in that, yeah,
things do go wrong and, you know, he forgot to carry the one
or he forgot the oxygen that he was exhaling and forgot to put
that in his calculation. So he had, you know, an off by 1
error that could have killed it. Very true.
Things were in there too. Yeah, there's there's a couple
of great scenes, the one you just described where he kind of
figures out Matt Damon's character, Mark Watt, and he
figures out how he can create water, you know, through this
whole, you know, science experiment of burning hydrogen
and oxygen and, and all of this. But then he blows himself up as
soon as he starts to do that because he forgot to account for
the oxygen that he was exhaling. And before that, there's the
scene right when he sort of gets back to the spacecraft after
things have gone all the hell at the beginning and his crews left
him behind where he's, I think it's the first time he's talking
into the camera and he's saying. Yeah, he's back in the Hab.
Yeah, exactly. And he says, you know, I have to
figure out how not to die of hunger, how not to die of
thirst, how not to suffocate. And if all of that goes exactly
right, then maybe they'll come and get me in four years or
whatever the time frame is, you know, So I have to figure out
how to grow enough food and create water and all this kind
of stuff. And you just see him with this
dead eyed 1000 yards staring to the camera of like, I don't
really know how to do all that. You know, and this is before you
know what his specialty is or you know how dumb or smart he
is. You assume he's smart because
he's an astronaut, but we don't know what his science background
is at that point or anything. He's just like, here's a bunch
of problems. I'm going to try not to die up
here alone. And we keep hearing over and
over again, You know, this reminds me so much of Apollo 13,
which was also a great example of clujing things together to,
you know, during an emergency. And I kept hearing in both
movies over and over again, work the problem.
Let's work the problem. And you can tell that when he
sits down, that's the first thing he's going to do.
And you know you work one problem and then you work the
next one, and then you work the next one.
Yeah. And they bring it back really
well at the end of the movie in that scene at the astronaut
training center where he he says that in his opening statement to
these, you know, candidate astronauts of like, yes, you're
going to be up there and everything's going to go to
hell. And you have to, you have to
look at it the way you just described, Wendy.
You find a problem, you work that problem.
And if you solve enough of those problems, you get to come home.
Then. Then you're a skeleton on Mars.
But yeah, you're exactly right about the Apollo 13 thing, too.
I watched that, you know, within the last month as well.
And the very famous scene right when things go to hell on that
flight. And Tom Hanks says, you know,
Houston, we've had a problem. And one of them I, I think it's
Bill Paxton's problem or character sort of like freaks
out a little bit. And, you know, Tom Hanks says,
calm down. Let's let's start working the
problem because otherwise we're going to die right now.
You know, and it that kind of level headed logical thinking is
you have that. I don't really have it as much
as as I would. I would die very quickly in
space. I'm sure I would too, but
there's another parallel between Apollo 13 and The Martian that I
just love. There's a call back in The
Martian to actually, but you know the the line about Rich
Pernell being a steely eyed missile man.
And that was actually a quote about a gentleman named John
Aaron who first saved Apollo 12's bacon by because he read
everything. He read all the documentation.
And so he as soon as you know something that they were hit by
lightning and they lost telemetry, he figured out
immediately, you know, how to how to fix that.
That's what earned in the moniker because he was so cool
working the problem. He was a steely eyed missile
man. And then he did it again for
Apollo 13, helping them figure out how to how to kluge that
stuff together. So I loved seeing and I got to
explain it to my oldest. That steely eyed missile man
line is real, and it's referring to a real person.
Yeah, I love that, too. The first time I saw this movie
was actually with my kids and my wife.
We watched it maybe whenever it came out on cable or HBO or
something, you know, maybe a year after it had come out in
the theater. My kids were, I don't know,
probably in like middle school and high school at the time.
And the same thing that that line, like rung a bell in my
head. I was like, why do I know what
that line is? And I had to quickly look it up
and I explained it to them. They're like, oh, that's really
cool that they like incorporate. There's a few other things in
this movie too that they brought in from real life and, you know,
kind of real astronauts experience, you know, with the
Apollo missions and things like that.
But yeah, I love that as well. There's just those little
callbacks and that's, you know, that's a testament to Andy
Weir's writing. And also just like the the power
of that kind of storytelling, you know that you can you can
have those callbacks that really like ring true in a in a film
like this. And he was having fun with it.
You could tell. I mean, the you know, that they
managed to fit a good amount of snark in into the movie, even
though you couldn't read all get all of the interior monologue
that was in the book. But you, you know, you got a lot
and it kept it from being one of the, you know, a terrible scary
drama, you know, with two-dimensional heroes and
everything. I, I suspect we both just
identified so much with both with Mark Watney and I, I
identified a lot with Commander Lewis, you know, being
responsible for the team and taking everything on herself.
And then, you know, people at NASA and all of the politics
about do we tell them? Do we not tell them?
Do we go behind his back? That's it feels so much like
things that we do every day in security.
It's so true. Yeah.
There's the tension. There's, you know, probably 3
different sources of tension in this movie.
There's is Mark Watney going to die on this planet?
You know, the first time you're watching this, you, you don't
totally know, you assume they're not going to kill Matt Damon on
Mars. So you're probably pretty sure
he's going to survive. But there's also the tension of
all the people on the ground at NASA, at JPL trying to figure it
all out, but also the internal bickering of like, you know, a
little bit of a power struggle between Sean Bean's character
and Jeff Daniels character. You know, that kind of, you
know, is the central tension there.
And you know, Sean Bean didn't even die once in this movie.
Not even once. Which is rare for him.
He almost in almost every other thing he's in, he gets killed in
some terrible way and. Early on.
Early on, it's also one of the rare movies where he's playing a
present day person and not someone in Game of Thrones or
Lord of the Rings or, you know, Odysseus or something like that,
you know, But yeah, there's, there's all those different
sources of narrative tension in this in this movie.
And I sometimes I find myself I'm like, all right, enough with
the like NASA shit on the ground.
Can we get back to Watney doing science on Mars?
But then there's so many good scenes with, you know, Donald
Glover's character, Rich Parnell, who I really wanted
more of. He's so good.
He's so funny and just like, absolutely mirrors probably 20
people that we both know that are absolute geniuses and have
like 0 respect for authority and are just like, look, I, I
already solved your problem. What are you guys arguing about?
Like I already figured this out. Like, what are we all doing
here? Let's go do this.
Like the scene that I think they call the Council of Elrond
where, you know, just a great one.
With Project Elrond, yeah. Yes, yes, that's it.
That has, you know, Jeff Daniels, the NASA director,
Donald Glover's character, Kristen Wiig's character.
And don't forget him. And Sean Bean and yes, Vincent
Koor, all in this in the conference room and trying to
figure out if there's a way for them to get him back more
quickly. And, you know, Rich Bernal just
stands up and, you know, starts moving people around the room to
demonstrate the slingshot maneuver.
And he says to Jeff Daniels, what's your name again?
He's like, so and so I'm the director of NASA and he's like.
Oh cool. Cool, yeah, let me get your pen
stand over there. You're the moon or something
like that. You know, just the offhanded,
you know, kind of brilliance that those people have.
Like that's a, it's a great portrayal cause those people are
absolutely real. And and it cracks me up,
especially when they got to the part of it it mid politics.
Teddy Sanders says, you know, and you're just doing this
because Vincent Kapoor isn't here.
He's over at JPL. But I said, you know, in the
last scene you just showed a Cisco Webex video.
Why can't you just get on the video that that was 1 bobble
that I I had a problem with but you know I I noticed whenever
the Cisco logos on something. I yes, that was a little jarring
to me, too. I had forgotten about that.
But it shows up quite a bit in this movie.
Yeah. But they they do such a nice job
of portraying everybody as a as a fallible human, Even the
smartest people in the story, they're all, you know, brilliant
to some degree as having real human faults.
You know, Jeff Daniels character has to worry about the sort of
public facing politics of all of this.
When do we tell the public that he's still alive?
When do we could tell the crew that he's still alive?
You know, Sean Bean is worried about that kind of stuff too.
And everybody's got these kind of internal problems they're
struggling with, along with Commander Lewis, Jessica
Chastain's character who you mentioned, who kind of takes it
all on herself for leaving him behind because, you know,
ultimately it was her, you know, order to the rest of the.
Yeah, right. You know, they were just
following her, her directive, which, you know, is a way that
good leaders think. But it's also, you know, those
other astronauts, of course, feel some guilt for that as
well. Yeah.
And it kind of illustrates for me the the difference that gets
discussed between intention, intention and impact.
And you can see this going through her head, like,
obviously she didn't intend to leave him behind, but that was
the impact, that was the result. And.
What was the outcome? On that and you, you have to
keep going. Right.
And the a worse version of this movie go dives deep into like,
the psychological impact on all those astronauts and how, you
know, they show her just like with her head in her hands,
staring out the window into space on the space station for,
you know, minutes at a time. But, you know, you get a little
flash of her. You know, there's the scene of
her them all realizing that he's still alive.
And then they get on with it. They're like, OK, what are we
going to do about it? Like, are we turning around to
go get him? Yes, they.
Take a minute to process and then they're like, OK, our
minutes over, now let's get back to work.
Let's work the problem. Right.
It's a very, you know, logical, you know, almost ruthless
mindset of like, OK, there's only two outcomes here.
Either we go get him or he dies in some terrible fashion that we
can all imagine and we've all trained for, you know, so I
don't remember whose character it was, but somebody was like,
it's not even we're going like we got to go, you know, whether
it's right now or we figure out this other plan that NASA has.
But they do a really nice job with that.
They show the human impacts, but they don't just dwell on it like
it. You kind of get the point.
Yeah, Yeah. It's it's very business like and
I'd I'd just like to point out how many Marvel Cinematic
Universe actors are in this movie together.
You have Benedict Wong, who I love.
You've got Sebastian Stan also. You've got she wait till age of
four and and you've got. Matt Damon's in some Marvel
movies. Yes, that's right.
That's right. He has a couple of couple of
cameos in the in the thorough movies and yeah, just just
watching all of that and going, wow, you know how many of them
have worked together in Hollywood and then they're just
all, you know, penned up together doing this movie.
It's I wrote down in my notes watching this, I've seen this
movie probably like 15 times all the way through and fragments of
it dozens and dozens of times. But in my notes, I wrote down
that this is probably the best looking astronaut crew that's
ever been assembled in human history.
They're so glamorous, you're right.
God, there's a, you know, they cut to like, Jessica Chastain
and Kate Mara and, yeah, Sebastian Stan and Michael Pena,
all these people you're like. Oh yeah, Michael Pena.
He was also Marvel, Yeah. Right Ant Man and the wasp.
Just like these are the best looking people on earth and just
have them all in the space station.
What are the odds? Right, Yes.
I mean, I've seen what astronauts look like.
They don't typically look like those people.
Oh, another thing that that my dad did was for a little while
he was teaching astronomy to the NASA astronauts during their
training. Oh, just a little while.
Just just a little while. And then he he actually got
annoyed with the NASA bureaucracy and stopped doing
stuff for them. I don't think that's unusual.
I mean it, you know, bureaucracies, I don't know what
year that was, but, you know, government bureaucracies
multiply. And, you know, they, they've
been known to drive out a few brilliant minds in their time.
Yeah. How, how often do you think that
happens in in cybersecurity? I mean, we certainly know a few
people it's happened to for sure.
I think it happens relatively relatively often in the
government world. I'm not sure in the corporate
world that we live in, and I think it happens pretty often,
especially if you're 1 of, you know, kind of the independent
minder minded hacker persona of like, I do this one thing.
I do it really well, let me go do that thing.
And then they start putting you into six hours of meetings every
day and you can't do that thing that you're good at.
Incredibly frustrating, you know, and I've been in that
position. You've been in that position.
A lot of our friends have. And I I think that's a really
good question, Wendy. It's, it's a good parallel.
Yeah. It's it.
Yeah, the if you think about not just corporate cybersecurity,
but also what SIS is going through right now, Sure pointed
out that those people are still working the problems even though
they're not getting paid. Yeah, and you know, in some ways
are kind of under hostile. Hostile fire.
Yeah, from their own administration.
And in some cases, yeah, it's funny 'cause I'm, I, I watched
this movie a couple times over the weekend.
And I'm also rereading The Cuckoo's Egg by Cliff Stoll
right now just for, I don't really know why I, I kind of run
out of things to, to read. And I was like, you know what, I
haven't read this in a few years.
I'm going to pick it back up. And there's so many parallels in
there too, like the astronomy part of it for people that
haven't read that book. I mean, he was a PhD astronomer
and astrophysicist who got, you know, essentially shuffled off
to a computer lab for funding reasons and wound up in this,
you know, insane cyber, cyber espionage story.
But kind of the same thing of like, here's the $0.75
accounting error. What caused that?
We know every. Now I got to know.
I got to figure this out. Does it matter?
It was like, you know, pennies off.
But it doesn't make sense to me. Therefore I need to investigate.
Right. I'm going to sleep on the floor
of this computer lab literally for like weeks at a time until I
figure this out. And even when he did, like
people didn't believe him. And you know, that the whole
thing, the FBI was like, we don't, we don't care.
And $0.75, we don't. It's not our problem.
But yeah, it's the same. It's the same idea of like
persistence and just problem solving that, you know, it was
required for people in our field.
And it's, that's why this, I think this movie, you know,
becomes more and more resonant for me every time I every time I
go back to it. Yeah, it reminds me of a lot of
situations that we find ourselves in where we go, wow,
that just happened. OK, now what do we do?
Because, you know, who knew that that that that thing was going
to happen? There's new stuff every day.
And it's like, really? Yeah, that that just happened.
Really. So much of that, yeah, I, I
mean, I hate talking about AI, but I think that's a pretty good
example right now. Like that kind of just happened
in an 18 month span and now everybody's trying to figure out
what the hell to do about it. Like how do we secure these
agents? How do we, I mean, there's a
whole rabbit hole we could go down there, but that's the most
current example that, you know, I could come up with of like
this is a disruptive force that's making people rethink the
way that they, you know, protect their networks and do their jobs
in a lot of cases. And that all sorts of things
that we run into like cascading failures, you know, dependencies
that are not mapped, there's no way to map all of them.
And so one of them just makes itself known.
And 1000, you know, 1000 organizations go down because of
that one dependency. So there's so many things that
in hindsight you might have been able to predict, but who has
time for that? Yeah, that's the.
I have cascading failures written in my notes, too, just
in all block letters. Yeah, of course, because it's
just sort of in the behind the scenes thing that I watched.
There was a little short interview with Andy Weir, the
author, who said that the original idea for this book came
to him. He was just trying to.
He was at his day, day job thinking about like, I wonder if
he'll ever put somebody on Mars, you know?
And then he started thinking about how we would get there.
Like, we, we had sent probes at this time, like, how would
people live there? And then what if they ran out of
water or food or oxygen? And then he thought, well, why
don't I just give all of those problems to 1 character?
And. And see what happens.
And that's how you get Mark Watney just, you know, getting
kicked in the literally punctured in the stomach and,
you know, blowing himself up and.
Mark Watney, Full stack astronaut.
Right and crash test dummy and crash test.
Dummy, you know, another thing that I really appreciate about
it is, you know, not just the the different forms of narrative
tension and everything, but Matt Damon was really did a good job.
He was able to convey so much with just breathing because you
heard so much of him just breathing inside the suit and.
There's so much of that. I mean, this movie fails
miserably if if they don't have Damon, in my in my opinion.
I mean, I'm sure there's other people that could have done it,
but he's, he's got that perfect mix of you take him seriously as
an actor, but he can be funny too, obviously, you know, And
he, he's acting against a green screen almost the entire movie,
you know, aside from the very beginning and the very end.
It's him talking into a GoPro or acting against, you know, a AVFX
backdrop. And he's got to convey a lot.
Yeah. With just facial expressions or
grunts or Yeah, like how rapid his breathing is in the
spacesuit, or just like exasperated gestures or.
Yeah, annoying breathing. There's, you know, there's
desperate breathing, there's painful breathing.
You know, you could just sit there and and take notes of all
of the different ways in which he conveys what's going on.
It's so true. Yeah.
It's any little piece of this movie, like, like, they almost
didn't get Ridley Scott because he had a scheduling conflict and
it was going to be directed by Drew Goddard, who was the
screenwriter, but he went off to do some other movie.
So they shifted the schedule and got Ridley Scott, which worked
out great. And as soon as that happened,
Matt Damon said, oh, you got Ridley Scott.
I'm in. So you got, you got, you know,
Ridley Scott and Matt Damon, you're 85% of the way to a hit,
you know, especially in 2015, just at the top of their game.
Yeah. Don't don't say they peaked in
2015 and. Absolutely not.
Their feelings. Nope, at the top of their game.
I didn't say they came down. They're just they're up there.
I wanted to. The thing that cracks me,
there's a few like extremely funny scenes in this to me, and
one of the nerdiest funny ones is when he's trying like he's
got the camera, he's figured out Pathfinder, he's dug it up and
he's trying to figure out how he's going to communicate with
NASA on the ground instead of these yes, no questions with the
camera. And he lands on hexadecimal and
ASCII and you know, he goes digging through the other
astronauts things and he's like, I knew one of you nerds would
have an ASCII table laying around which you know.
And there it. Is there?
It is yes. And I thought to myself, I was
like, OK, there was a time in my life where I basically
understood ASCII. That time is long past now.
I went and looked it up. I was like, oh God, this is
giving me PTSD, but the the fact that like he knows that this is
going to work, but he asked to even the people on the ground
are like they're they're looking at a table too.
They don't know. I don't know that anybody just.
I know somebody I knew somebody who used to work at at Bellcore
who did have it memorized. Oh my God, of course you do.
Dictate things and has hexadecimal.
Of course I would have to look it up, but.
I think any normal person would have to look it up.
Even. Even scientists and astronauts,
of course, but the idea that they land on that, which is a
really elegant solution to a very thorny problem because they
have the the ground control guy who's in that conversation with
Vincent Kapoor, who's like, well, all you can do is point
the camera at yes or no. This isn't exactly going to be
the Algonquin roundtable discussion.
And Vincent Kapoor's like, are you kidding me?
Just do it. You know, he's like, figure this
out. So they kind of land on that.
And Matt Damon's the one that, you know, Watney figured it out,
not the people on the ground. He's like, I got it, Hexadecimal
while he's eating his five thousandth potato.
Yeah, while. He yeah, it's his 500th potato
and, and, and while he runs out of ketchup and he dips one in
crushed Vicodin. So it's 'cause there's nobody
who can stop me. It's so funny, I watched the
extended cut, which you can rent on Amazon right now and it's,
there's, I don't know, maybe about 8 or 10 extra minutes.
And there's no big like extra scenes or anything.
It's just kind of a little bit added to various scenes, you
know, some extra dialogue and there's some extra 1 liners and
they kind of hold that shot a little longer where he's like
putting the the potato in the Vicodin and he's like, I ran out
of ketchup like 8 days ago so and nobody can stop me.
It. Says the little touches like
that that you know that that add the humor that takes like a very
serious science based story and just takes it up so many
different notches for me. Now I, I really, I, I liked it
when he decided, you know, and work work through it and showed
his work then and explained why he's a space pirate.
But I don't know if you you this may not have happened to you,
but I started thinking, well, why didn't they call him the
space cowboy of. Course I thought about.
That we could have called him Maurice.
And now I've had that song stuck in my head all day getting ready
for this podcast. I love it.
Andy Weir went no, that's too weird even for me.
Probably did, honestly. Or, I don't know, like I don't
remember from the book. I'm sure that some of the disco
jokes were in there about Commander Lewis's music.
I don't remember. OK, OK.
Because that was one of the other things that I think put
this movie up a notch for me was the soundtrack.
Because like, that is not my music.
Like, I don't love ABBA or, you know, all that, but it fits so
well. Every needle drop is just such a
perfect fit for where they place it in the movie.
And the running joke of him just talking shit about Commander
Lewis's musical taste. And.
How terrible it is. It's just great, you know, it
just adds that extra layer. Yeah, yeah.
Like the the scene where he's driving around in the Rover and
Waterloo comes on the ABBA song and they play the entire thing.
It's like 3 minutes of him just driving around to that song.
Yeah, just like happily sweating with that, you know, degrading
nuclear bomb behind him, essentially.
Yeah, and then him going from sweating to freezing and then
and then back again and, yeah, again, you know, playing,
playing a character who is completely isolated for almost
all the movie. And you can't just, you can't
expose some of the, you can't play some of the emotion
emotions by talking to people because you're not talking to
anybody. He had to do it in so many
different ways. And, you know, you, you see
parts where he almost loses it and then he gets back to it.
And then finally, when he's waiting to blast off for them to
catch him, that's when he finally breaks down.
Yeah, that's a really effective scene, you know, that that's
another one that could have gone badly.
It could have been like overly saccharine.
But just, you know, the tension of him sitting in this capsule
that he's taken all the roof off of and he's, you know, he knows
it's probably not going to go perfectly.
And, you know, Commander Lewis is like, we're almost there,
Watney, hang on one minute. And he's like, OK, can't wait to
see you guys. And he's crying like it's, it's
really great. You you can feel all the pent
up. Like, I don't remember how long
he's been there at that point, like a year and a half or
something like that. Yeah, what was it, 18 months?
And and also that was the this the scene where he he no longer
had control of anything. He had to wait, you know, for,
for his colleagues to come back and catch him.
The only thing he could do was hang on, whereas for the
previous 18 months he could keep busy working the first problem
and the next and the next and the next.
He was all done. There it was out of his hands.
And I, I could really feel, you know, the interiority of him
thinking about everything that he just lived through,
everything that he just survived and crying, finally letting
himself cry because of that. That's exactly right.
That's a perfect. That's so well said, Wendy.
Because he that entire 18 months or whatever it was, he was
independent. Yes, he was alone, but he could
do whatever he wanted essentially.
Like, you know, he had to ask. Yeah, right.
Eat Vicodin for breakfast. But he had things to do.
He like he woke up every morning and he was like, OK, I have to
make water. I have to make food.
I have to not suffocate. I have to go do all these
things. And then once that was all done
and he was sitting in that seat, he's like, OK, well, now it's in
Martinez's hands. He's the one that's going to be
controlling this capsule remotely.
I've got to rely on these people again.
And they're the jerks that left me on Mars in the 1st place, you
know? Yeah, I could.
You could feel all of that kind of tension release right in that
moment. And it's it's a perfect
encapsulation. What a terrible pun.
But of the whole thing. You know, well done, Dennis.
I didn't mean to, but it just happened.
It happened. The other the other part that I
hadn't forgotten, but I forgot like how complex it is, is when
they're actually have to go and retrieve him.
Like after he's like, you know, they blast him off and then very
quickly they figure out, oh, shit, he's going way too fast or
we're going way too fast. The relative velocity is way too
fast. And he's much farther away from
us than we thought because the trajectory was off.
And. Because of the tarp coming off
which, and you know who saw this coming?
A convertible spaceship. What a great idea, Spaceship.
Yeah. Yes.
But then really quickly, they, the space station crew
improvises. And Jessica Chastain says to,
you know, the German, I can't remember his, the character's
name is like, hey, can you build a bomb?
Is what we have Fogel? Yes, thank you.
And he's like, well, yeah. But I have to point out that
building a bomb on a space station is a really terrible
idea. I'm not sure I should do that.
And then they, you know, essentially.
And he's doing a little bit of this and a little bit.
Of that yeah he's like easy bake oven bomb in the space station
with Kate Mara and then they blow off the vacuum locks so
that they can decelerate the space station space station is
not the right word but the craft that they're on to reduce the
relative velocity and distance between the two of them and then
Lewis goes out there and they you know even that goes badly
because she misses him at 1st and put reels them in with the
the strap but. Yeah, I mean, she, she tries to
grab them and, and their hands, you know, don't grab but but he
grabs the the tether and they manage to and, and I love, you
know, that the physics of them as they get closer and closer to
each other, they're spinning faster and faster, which is what
is supposed to happen. Yeah, the slow motion kind of
reunion where they're just kind of orbiting, seeing each other
was was really well done. And, you know, the kind of end
of the movie where, you know, they don't spend a ton of time
on it. Once he gets back on the space
station, you know, they they're all happy for about 25 seconds
and then they kind of like cut to the celebration on Earth.
And then you know, that last scene that I mentioned with him
teaching the the astronaut class, which is a great little
coda it, you know, it, it kind of wraps it all up in a really
nice way. I, I think also what really got
me is, you know, dissolving to being on Earth.
And, you know, you see that they've all made it back.
He's just sitting there against all that green.
And that is such, such a huge difference.
And you know, that's all you have to say.
Right anything it's so true and he looks down at his feet and
there's a little tiny sprout of something coming up through the
gravel and he repeats the line it he says hey there like you
said to the potato I think when he.
Was, you know, where's potato plant?
Yeah yeah, poop farming on on Mars.
We we kind of skipped over or forgot to mention that the
entire subplot, not subplot, but but portion with the Chinese
space agency. Yes, that was really good too.
It's so well done because, and I always forget about it, it right
in the middle of the movie, like the resupply thing that they
sent that NASA sends up there just explodes 20 seconds after
launch. And they're kind of like, well,
that we're screwed. He's dead.
We're going to look like fools. And then the, you know, the
training species kind of comes to the rescue and says, well, we
have this technology that they don't have.
But if we help them, we're going to be declassifying this and
giving them an advantage. And the woman is like, well, we
kind of have to do that. We can't just let this guy die
up there knowing we could have helped them.
Yeah, and I love that the, you know, that the, the actual, the
director is on the same wavelength and, you know, it's a
nice warm moment where you know, they know they're going to help.
It's not another area of tension.
It's not that, you know, there's nothing stereotyped about the
Chinese there and oh, they're just going to mess with the
Americans or anything. No, they're, they're doing
something very human and very generous.
And I I love that. I did too.
It's really, yes, that could have gone sideways very easily.
And there's a line that Benedict Wong's character says we, I
think he says, thanks to my Uncle Tommy, we get an extra
chance at this. And I remember the first time I
watched this thinking that can't be his actual uncle, right?
And he he was being, you know, facetious.
But I was like, that's a little too convenient if the director
of the Chinese space agency is this character's uncle.
But he's, you know, but yeah, it's, it's really well done
because you see the cooperative spirit that actually, you know,
gets things done. You know, you, it's very
difficult to succeed by yourself.
You know, even if you're NASA you you usually need help from
somebody else. Yeah.
And that's, that's the spirit that may, you know, makes this
the space station work. It's, you know what, what made
the whole space program continue to evolve, and it's what makes
cybersecurity work when we kind of put aside those borders and
say, look, the right thing to do is to help each other.
It's very true. I mean, the, the cliche that's
come up in the last like 10 years about cybersecurity being
a team sport is a cliche for a reason.
Because it's true as you just mentioned, you can't get very
far in this field on your own. You know, you just can't.
It's much too difficult and there's too many outside forces
and too many unknowns and even, you know, people as experienced
as you, there's lots of things that just aren't your area of
expertise and you need other people to help you.
You know, it's and it's a lot more fun when you're doing
things with other people too. And you want to share what you
know when you figure something out.
I mean, we're all figuring things out as fast as we can.
And when you figure something out, you know you want to share
it so somebody else doesn't have to go through the same agony
that you did. That's exactly right.
And they portray that really well at the end of this movie
where when Damon's character is teaching that class and you can
see the joy on his face of getting to tell these stories to
these, you know, 25 year olds in this classroom setting.
And, you know, the last shot of the movie is him saying, OK, any
questions and every hand in the room goes up.
Yes, every single person has a question, which is just great.
It's perfect. So you mentioned early on that
we're kind of doing this. We're recording this, I think 2
days before Project Hail Mary actually comes out in most of
the country. Neither one of us has seen it
yet. Hopefully by the time people,
you know, actually gets to this, they will.
But I'm dying to see it. I read that book.
I absolutely loved it. I was knocked out by it.
It was so good. I think it's better than The
Martian. They're they're different, but I
probably enjoyed it more. They're both great.
But I'm everything I've heard about that movie so far is just
like 9 out of 1010 out of 10. It's a you know, I haven't heard
a bad word about it. News and and I I heard that Ryan
Gosling actually got the the movie rights before the book was
actually published and he's been working on making this movie for
like 6 years. That's crazy that I mean, I
really enjoy him. Like he's such a versatile guy
and he's he's got that sense of humor too that Damon has, you
know, that kind of sly, like, you know, knowing look or
sarcasm. That's not malicious.
It's just kind of like this cheeky, you know, mischievous.
Totally yes. He can't be mean.
He's Canadian, so. Yes.
Yeah, I'm really looking forward to that.
I think it's going to be great. So that it's AI think it'll be a
perfect companion to this movie too.
Lot of hackery going on there too.
Except more hardware. Well, no, maybe not.
More hardware about the same. Yeah, a lot of hardware in
Project Hail Mary. I mean, they're not to spoil
any. They're manufacturing things in
that movie or in that story. There's a lot of stuff going on
there. They're even in a worse position
than Mark Watney was in this movie.
You know, it's just one guy dying in The Martian in Project
Hail Mary. It's many, many more.
Yeah. Yeah.
Sorry. Spoiler.
Everyone. All right?
Wendy, thank you so much for doing this.
It's great to see you. I love having you on here.
And I'll see you next week. In person next week and maybe we
can sneak off and go watch Project Hail Mary.
It's a date you're on. All right.
All right, talk to you soon.