Counter-Currents
1,031 words
Ridley Scott’s The Martian
On one such mission a powerful storm forces a six-man team to evacuate the planet and return to their orbiting base ship while they still have a chance. Unfortunately, botanist Mark Watney (Matt Damon) is swept away in the storm and apparently killed, so his crewmates depart without him. Watney, however, survived and is marooned on Mars with a limited food supply and no way to communicate with Earth. His only chance of rescue, moreover, is years in the future, long after he will have starved.
So, after stitching up the wound he suffered in the storm, Watney coolly takes stock of his resources — food supplies, a Martian habitat, a Martian rover, a collection of ’70s disco, freeze-dried human excrement, rocket fuel, etc. — and comes up with a survival and rescue plan. He learns to grow potatoes in human excrement and Martian soil. He modifies the rover to extend its range, then uses it to find an old Martian lander that he can use to communicate with NASA.
At this point you realize that this fairly straightforward and jocular narrative has been sneaking up on you to deliver an unexpected and powerful emotional catharsis. When Watney finally communicates with Earth, we are flooded with his fear and loneliness and relief. You’d need a heart of stone not to shed a tear in this scene, and there are more like it to come.
A rescue plan is set in motion, and although the suspense is often quite intense, there is never really any doubt that the Martian Mark Watney will return home to Earth.
The Martian is a very white, very American movie. Matt Damon is basically a high tech frontiersman — a final frontiersman — who triumphs over adversity using science, technology, and courage. It is also a very Faustian movie, a movie about the exploration of the cosmos, a movie about dedicating one’s life to something bigger than oneself, namely mankind’s ongoing conquest of nature.
But The Martian is a product of today’s film industry, which means that its real virtues are accompanied by two serious flaws. First, the movie advances the false worldview of racial and sexual egalitarianism. Second, the morally and metaphysically elevating themes of the movie are undercut by vulgar colloquialism.
The American space program was the product almost exclusively of white men, with our mastery of science and technology, longing for new frontiers, and rivalry with our enemies. America dropped the torch of space exploration when Jewish and Leftist values became dominant. We now have better things to do than explore space, like giving free cell phones to Negroes and a media megaphone to witches exercised about a scientist’s sinful shirt.
The most false and offensive aspect of The Martian is that it postulates that the US space program will somehow revive in a society in which racial and sexual egalitarianism are the dominant values. The main character, Matt Damon’s Mark Watney, is of course white. But his six-man crew has two female members, including the captain, and although five crewmembers are white, the pilot is Hispanic. NASA’s director of Mars missions is supposedly an African-Hindu hybrid played by a black actor. The genius who figures out the rescue plan is also played by a black. (Remember, this is science fiction.) An important scientist is played by an Asian, and when NASA needs help, he kindly intercedes with his uncle who runs the Red Chinese space agency. (In the real world, of course, such a scientist would likely be one of the many Chinese-American spies passing intelligence and technology to the Chinese.) The Red Chinese gallantly offer one of their rockets after the Americans prove that they can’t perform the rescue on their own. A couple important characters in NASA are white women, and so on.
Although The Martian is pro-diversity, one cannot really call it anti-white. The hero and the majority of the cast are highly attractive, serious, and competent white people. No race-mixing is portrayed. And there is a subtle pro-natalism to the film, for one of the astronauts, the German Vogel, has at least four beautiful white children, and two of the astronauts on the mission later marry and have a child at the very end.
Another aspect of egalitarian rot is the pervasive vulgarity of the script. This is a movie about heroism, with a plot worthy of a classic 19th-century novel. But the language and music do not measure up. Lest we idolize Mark Watney too much, he has to be “humanized,” with vulgar language and tastes. At one point he vows to “science the shit” out of one of his problems, which he proceeds to do to a medley of ’70s pop songs. At a certain point, I felt a tightness in my gut and feared that we would soon be treated to a dance montage like in Tootsie or its ripoff Mrs. Doubtfire. Ayn Rand brilliantly satirized this kind of anti-Romanticism as the “I’m sorry I can’t take you to the pizza joint tonight baby, I’ve got to go back to the lab and split the atom” approach to science fiction. The sets of The Martian are clearly inspired by 2001: A Space Odyssey. One wishes the soundtrack was as well. Heroic deeds require elevated words and music.
One wonders how more dignified ages have dawned. The Victorian age, for instance, followed the decadence of the Regency era. Thus those “stuffy” early Victorians were not unacquainted with degeneracy. But at a certain point they took themselves seriously enough to regard their little indulgences as contemptible, as childish, as beneath them. And then they just put them away.
These flaws aside, The Martian is an excellent movie that will speak especially to whites. It is a reminder that White Nationalists are not only working to save our race from the mud but to put us back on the path to the stars.
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9 comments
Awesome review! I only wish this came out when the film was still topical.
Thanks. I completely missed the film in theaters.
Multicultural propaganda at its worst! A white man (Watney) is marooned on Mars, the best possible scenario for rescue is found by a brilliant black man (too bad you never see them in real life). The white leadership at NASA wants to give up on Watney, but a cultured, sensitive black man (the white man’s moral compass) persuades them to mount a rescue operation. Is it not perplexing that the brilliant black man, and the sensitive, cultured, moral black man never make an appearance in the real world? Anyhoooo, the two motifs have become standard fare on the big and little screen. The multicultural rescue mission is headed by a strong white woman, and China is eventually enlisted to supply their return trip to Mars. The whole world is watching the rescue on big screen television at the end, and the only thing missing is everybody breaking out into a moving rendition of “Kumbaya My Lord, Kumbaya.” Break out the barf bags, barf-a-rama big time.
Add to it that the only crew member to return to space is the Latino pilot. Also Watney is shown by the end as he’s teaching a room of future astronauts, a room filled mostly with women and non-white men.
Faustian? If it’s Faustian, there is a deal with the devil that won’t end well.
The American space program, was the product of the German space program. This is actually too simple a statement to describe the situation. The Germany of pre-WW II and the Austro-Hungarian Reich, were the most technologically advanced nation states on earth. Their famous universities, now largely unknown, had teachers who themselves were some of the greatest scientists and scientific thinkers of the day. Students who could afford it, came to those schools from all over the world to be taught by people on the cutting edge of scientific knowledge. Enormous amounts of resources were spent by those universities, that resulted in that cutting edge knowledge. The U.S. and its allies after the second world war, confiscated that knowledge and those products that were the result of a hundred years of accumulated labor and money.
Only after this background is acknowledged, can anything be spoken of concerning an American space program. Even in this case, the technicians and scientists of those European nations, took front row center in developing a US. space program. The point is, the U.S. had inherited the results of enormous resources spent in both money and brains of a different place and time. It shocked me, when I learned that as late as 1958, there were many American scientists who believed a moon landing was totally impossible. Only the first director of NASA, Werner Von Braun, head of the Marshall Space Center, was able to convince President John F. Kennedy of the feasibility of a moon landing….
It’s a shame and rather petty, that this immense history and background concerning the story of space flight, never gets covered in American cinema and thus always leaves an impression that it’s ultimate success, was the result of sudden inspiration bordering on the miraculous that made it all possible. Some people have even suggested absurd explanations concerning the back engineering of alien space objects,etc. and maybe alien help that made these things possible. No, hard unrelenting and inspired work made it possible, along with the accumulated knowledge of a century of advanced scientific work and war, made it possible..
I agree with Mr. Lynch’s disdain of the vulgar language in the Hollywood movies of the last twenty five years or so. It’ weird how the writers seem to have this idea that unless they lace the movies with the most obscene language, something will somehow be missing from the script!! It’s plain disgusting and amazes me how naïve these writers are in thinking it necessary in order to keep the audience interested.
If you can get your hand on it, it’s worth reading the original script. You’ll see how much of the social-Leftist rot was introduced by Ridley Scott (ever the Cultural Marxist), and wasn’t there in the script.
(I haven’t read the original book which the script adapted, which might have even less CultMarxism than the script.)
Trevor Lynch is my go to reviewer for determining what I will let my kids watch without having to worry too much about what’s in it. These reviews are an important contribution for parents.
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