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The Martian: Bring Your Script Home

By Jacob Krueger

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The success of The Martian is extremely exciting if you're a screenwriter, especially because it breaks so much of the traditional Hollywood dogma. Often, as screenwriters, we think that our movies have to exist within some kind of orthodoxy: that there are certain things that you are just not allowed to do, and if you do them somehow you have no chance of writing a movie that's a hit. And yet, The Martian seems to throw all of those cares to the wind.

If you’ve taken the average Screenwriting 101 class you’ve probably been taught a couple of concepts that are supposed to be the rules for all movies.

You've probably been taught that structure is always built on characters' change. Yet, here is a character who doesn't change at all.

You’ve probably been taught that screenplay structure is built primarily around the relationships between characters. That you simply cannot leave your character alone on a planet, that he has to interact with somebody. That even Castaway was kind enough to give Tom Hanks a volleyball to interact with! Yet, here is a movie in which the character is primarily relating to his environment, and in which his only interactions with other characters, beyond the first few minutes of the movie, take place over email!

You've probably been taught that a movie must have an antagonist, and you've probably been taught that that antagonist is some kind of bad guy. Yet, in the world of this movie we don't have an antagonist. Or at least not one that is human. In fact, every character in the movie is trying to do the very best they can to solve an extraordinary problem with limited resources. Even the most overtly political character, the head of NASA, played by Jeff Daniels, is truly just trying to protect his space program and the lives of his crew.

So, we don't have a traditional bad guy. We don't have a movie that's built primarily around relationships. We don't have a character who changes. And yet, we do have an extraordinarily successful movie. So how did writer Drew Goddard make all that work?

The structure of The Martian is an unusual structure, but one we do see from time to time. And, strangely, we see this unusual, very challenging structure most often in big blockbusters.

I like to call these movies Test Movies. And the way a Test Movie functions is exactly the opposite of the way a traditional film functions.

Most films start off with a character with a problem, and that character must usually go through a painful and tumultuous journey in order to be forced to confront that problem and ultimately change.

This is the easiest way to build a movie, because the truth of the matter is, every human being in the world has a problem, and every human being in the world wants to change, and every human being, when we go to see a movie, has a part of us that looks up at that screen and says “that's me up there.”

So, there is a natural identification that happens when we see somebody who is like us, making the kinds of changes in their lives that we wish we could make in ours.

But a Test Movie like The Martian is built on exactly the opposite principle.

A Test Movie begins with a character with a very strong sense of themselves. It could be a character like Matt Damon’s character, Mark Watney, in The Martian, whose dominant trait is his unflagging belief in himself and in science, characterized by his competence, his positivity, his lightheartedness, and his can-do attitude even in the hardest situations.