Mark Watney Is a Space Hacker in The Martian

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.