Mark Watney of Mars: The Martian v2.0
A PROPOSAL
How different would The Martian be if we never left Mars? What if we, the audience, were stranded with Mark Watney on that desolate planet for the entire movie?
I invite you to enjoy Mark Watney of Mars: The Martian v2.0.
In many ways, it is a very different story. For one thing, the running time of Mark's endeavor has been reduced from 141 minutes to just over 59. The movie also loses all sense of teamwork. We don't fully understand the scale of NASA's mammoth rescue operation. We don't share in the risks or sacrifices being made on his behalf. We don't hear any voices other than that of Mark Watney.
The story is now almost entirely about isolation and self-determination and optimism in the face of overwhelming odds. When Watney says “I’m the first person to be alone on an entire planet,” I think we feel it more. Because we have been alone with him.
EASIER SAID THAN DONE
This project is actually harder than it sounds. It wasn't just a matter of lopping off any scene that doesn't take place on the red planet. Doing that would erase much exposition necessary to make this version stand alone as a work in and of itself. I wanted Mark Watney of Mars to make sense to someone who's never seen The Martian.
The trick was to take conversations heard in the movie and recreate them as text transmissions between Watney and his rescuers. Using footage from the films like 2001: A Space Odyssey as background plates for these new conversations, we can now experience the story of Mark Watney entirely from his point of view.
With the exception of the Jeff Daniels narration at the very beginning, we never see or hear anything that Watney doesn't experience first-hand. When The Martian was released, it was described by some as Cast Away on Mars. Now it truly is.
Hopefully you will find Mark Watney of Mars is a fluid reedit that works both as a piece of drama as well as an editorial investigation.
WHYS AND WHEREFORES
If you really want to know how I did what I did, or just want to see the parts that are different, here’s everything you would ever want to know about how this video was made.
AUDIO MIX:
As a professional editor, I know the audio mix is the least appreciated aspect of any edit. It is the bane of countless amateur projects made for the web. There is nothing worse than a bad audio edit. The ear is so much less forgiving than the eye. The eye will accept a jump cut. The ear will not.
The key to being able to cut the footage without cutting the soundtrack was to decode the 5.1 mix into separate, discrete channels. Once I did that, I was able to isolate and manipulate the audio almost at will. I could edit the center channel (containing the dialogue) without clipping the other channels. This method worked extremely well, up to a point. The center channel gave me a nearly clean dialogue track but it wasn’t perfect. The channel occasionally contained some of the movie's original score which pretty much locked me into using Harry Gregson-Williams music. It would have been fun to swap in something completely new but it would have made the mix a mess.
Special thanks to mixer Rich Cutler for his help making Jessica Chastain's dialogue just before Watney's liftoff in the MAV sound like radio transmissions.
NITTY GRITTY:
:00 - Right away, the story opens in a completely new way. Instead of seeing Mark with his fellow crewmates before, during and after the storm that initiate his stranding, we jump ahead ten minutes and open with Mark waking up from one nightmare and being thrust into another.
The Mars footage under the title is from Andrew Stanton’s (underrated) John Carter.
Did you know that The Hunt for Red October was the first movie to use a ‘telemetry’ sound effect to enhance text typing on screen? It’s true! The designer’s name was Frank Serafine. Red October won its lone Academy Award for Sound Effects and Sound Effects Editing but for some reason Serafine didn’t get an Oscar which seems wrong since he invented one of the most imitated tropes in modern movie history.
During the first half hour of Mark Watney of Mars, the only differences are the excisions. Gone are the scenes from where NASA discovers he is alive, where they debate what to do, where they try and figure out what he is doing.
Without these scenes, we don't really know what Mark is doing since, narratively, we don't have NASA to explain anything to us. I would argue that we are forced to be more active viewers as we follow Mark and try to discern what he is up to.
31:00 - Here is the first big chunk of text that had to be created. Using footage from the little-seen thriller The Last Days on Mars (directed by Ruairi Robinson), I was able to cut away to an exterior of the rover whenever necessary. Thankfully, the rover in both films looks pretty similar. Being a night scene helps cover the scenes too.
I also included Mark’s profane joke, taken directly from the source novel by Andy Weir. For some reason, they never revealed this joke in the original movie.
38:20 - Another text transmission. The star-field is from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. It’s the section of the movie where Frank Poole tumbles off into space. I masked him out to create a clean background for the type.
41:30 - This text transmission never appears in the movie. I gleaned the substance of the message from the Earth scenes that were excised. The background is from the pre-storm section of the film that was cut out of this version.
41:45 - Another invented exchange using exposition from both excised dialogue and the book. The horizon shot is from the ‘Dawn of Man’ sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
This was also a perfect place to re-purpose some of the first scenes of the movie that were removed. Mark in happier times and how he was left for dead are now shown as flashbacks. It matches up nicely with Watney's narration.
44:20 - The last invented transmission. I again used exposition taken from excised dialogue and the source novel. I did my best to channel a clipped, efficient, NASA-like prose style.
56:55 - The Ending: this is the most dramatic change in how the story is told. There was simply no way to stay solely with Watney and still show the specifics of how the Ares intercepted him. So instead, I took Watney’s dialogue from the epilogue and used it as narration and created an impressionistic montage illustrating how he came to rescued by his crewmates. Tonally it’s completely different from the original movie. But it works in it’s own way. And I’ve always been a fan of smash cuts and Watney’s last line set this one up perfectly.
The opening shot of this section was taken from Red Planet (directed by Antony Hoffman). The shot under the end credits is again from John Carter.
I hope you enjoy Mark Watney of Mars: The Martian v2.0. And I hope that the powers that be will allow it to live on online. I think of it first as an educational experiment but is is also an advertisement for The Martian itself. Eat your heart out, Neil Armstrong.
