Every Pop-Culture Reference in 'The Martian,' From 'Alien' to 'Zork II'
Though it’s set decades in the future, The Martian is well-grounded (and well-versed) in modern-day popular culture.
Ridley Scott’s unrepentant crowdpleaser, starring Matt Damon a botanist-astronaut accidentally stranded on the red planet, is loaded with playful references to TV shows, books, and video games; music cues certain to bring a smile; and callbacks to classic sci-fi films, including one of the director’s all-timers, Alien.
With The Martian set to dominate the box office for a second weekend, we went through and catalogued all the Easter eggs to watch out for the next time you make a date with Damon’s Mark Watney. Let us know what we missed in the comments. And, in case you didn’t realize it, there are spoilers galore below.
That ‘70s Show
Melissa Lewis (Jessica Chastain), the commander of the Ares 3 mission, is an unapologetic fan of disco, providing Watney with an unfortunate soundtrack to his solo sojourn on Mars. Apparently Lewis’s love the 1970s also extends to her TV viewing; also left behind is a collection of Happy Days videos, which Watney happily watches as he figures out his exit strategy. The stranded astronaut is so taken by the Fonz, that, when asked by NASA to pose for a photo that will be beamed back to Earth, Watney gives the trademark thumbs-up and “Ayyyy!” salutation — which doesn’t go over too well with the powers that be back home.
Avengers Assembled
In the film’s climactic scene, as Watney lifts off from Mars and attempts to rendezvous with his shipmates, he realizes he needs to “fly like Iron Man” to make it reach them — and then punctures a hole in suit and uses the escaping air pressure to pull a Tony Stark and propel himself through space. The Marvel reference is accentuated by the fact that the cast includes Sue Storm/Invisible Woman (Kate Mara), Captain America sidekick Bucky Barnes/The Winter Soldier (Sebastian Stan), and Ant-Man cohort Luis (Michael Peña) as fellow astronauts, while Miles Morales, a.k.a. the animated Ultimate Spider-Man (Donald Glover), is the Jet Propulsion Laboratory math whiz who dreams up the rescue plan.
The Fellowship
Meanwhile, Glover’s character, Rich Purnell, is responsible for the most joyously nerdy scene in the movie (and one that was almost cut by Scott). He gathers the NASA brain trust to reveal his radical idea to save Watney and dubs the meeting “Elrond,” after the Council of Elrond from J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.
The group of men, elves, dwarves, and hobbits convened to discuss how to dispatch the One Ring and rid Middle-earth of Sauron.
In The Martian, NASA’s resident eggheads start geeking out, with Jeff Daniels proclaiming, “My codename is Glorfindel!” (Glorfindel was one of Elrond’s trusted elf pals in The Fellowship of the Rings who helps rescue Frodo from the Ringwraiths and escorts the hobbit to Rivendell for the Council.) All of this is made even more awesome by the presence of Sean Bean, who co-stars as mission director Mitch Henderson, and, more importantly played Boromir, a member of the Council of Elrond, in Peter Jackson’s movie version of The Fellowship of the Ring.
Incidentally, the Elrond scene, in a slightly different form, exists in Andy Weir’s novel on which the film was based; the casting of Bean was pure icing.
Game On
In a movie with a high geek factor (author Weir is an avid gamer himself), it’s hardly surprising some old-school computer games get name-dropped. While perusing the contents of his crewmates’ laptops left behind on Mars, Watney discovers that Johanssen (Mara) had a couple of 1980s hits on hers: the Infocom adventures Zork II and Leather Goddesses of Phobos (which happens to have a level set on, yes, Mars).
But that’s not the only game allusion. During the climactic rescue mission Watney asks Martinez “not to do a barrel roll,” a reference to the classic line/meme from Star Fox 64.
The Spiders of Mars
One of the on-the-nose musical moments in the film comes when David Bowie’s “Starman” erupts on the soundtrack. (It’s not clear if we’re to assume “Starman” is part of Lewis’s extensive vintage vinyl collection since it, like some of the other ‘70s-era tunes on the soundtrack, aren’t specifically her genre of choice, disco.)
Not only do the lyrics of the bouncy 1972 cut reference otherworldly visitation pertinent to the plot (“There’s a Starman waiting in the sky/He’d like to come and meet us/But he thinks he’d blow our minds”), but the song comes from Bowie’s seminal Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars, which is chock-full of imagery based on our solar system’s fourth planet. And four years after the Ziggy album, Bowie starred in the sci-fi film The Man Who Fell to Earth, about an extraterrestrial who winds up stranded on Earth.
Another Space Odyssey
While The Martian also owes a debt to films like Apollo 13 and Gravity, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey remains the gold standard for interstellar sci-fi, setting the visual template for generations of filmmakers, Scott among them.
Scott took several cues from 2001 for his 1979 classic Alien and again paid homage to Kubrick’s classic in The Martian. The Hermes, the ship that ferries the crew to and from Mars features a spinning section similar to the satellite from 2001. There’s also a scene of Johanssen running on a stationary treadmill that hearkens back to the iconic image of Gary Lockwood jogging through the Discovery One in 2001.
Alien DNA
Finally, there are several callbacks to Alien. A shot of the sun peeking over the rim of a planet was first used by Kubrick in the 2001 open, then by Scott in Alien and again in The Martian.
‘The Martian’
‘Alien’
‘2001’
Some fans on Reddit also insist the intro theme music of The Martian is similar to Alien. Judge for yourself:
‘The Martian’ Opening Theme
’Alien’ Opening Theme
While updated, the tech in The Martian — from the computer monitors to the wall panels to the ship corridor — seems like it would be at home on the Nostromo, the salvage ship in Alien. Even more striking: The scene where the Ares 3 team is walking through the Martian storm in their lit-up suits is reminiscent of the scene where the Nostromo crew checks out the alien wreck.
‘The Martian’
‘Alien’
There’s also a scene with the group of astronauts reclining in their seats in The Martian that resembles the early sequence in Alien when the Nostromo crew emerges from their pods.
‘The Martian’
‘Alien’
But the best Alien gag isn’t even in The Martian proper. It comes from the “Ares 3: Farewell” teaser that Fox released in June. The clip, ostensibly Matt Damon’s Watney giving Earthbound fans a tour of the ship before liftoff, features pop-up “tweets” including this one when Watney introduces German navigator Alex Vogel (Aksel Hennie):
Synthetics, of course, are the android crew members, typically unknown to their human counterparts until some pivotal moment, and are integral to the Alien franchise.
Crossover, anyone?
