Since I was a little kid, I've been captivated by this kind of movies and books, which depicted a man living in somewhere all by himself. Here by "all by himself", I don't literally mean that "by oneself", but more like describing a state of mind - no matter where one is, one could always focus on one's own need, knowing what one wants and what one need and take the next logic and relatively right step correspondingly. For instance, everybody knows that the big big detective Sherlock Holmes has a best friend who basically shares every day with him, but strictly speaking, most of the time, he's deeply immersed in his own world, deleting the redundant data in his mind, building another well-organized room in his Mind Palace, and being busy with solving all the intriguing crimes in the world which could bring him a constant pleasure. Waston to him, in my perspective, is more like an quiet and elegant audience who would give him a hand whenever he's in need and take care of his daily life, just like a senior butler, or serve as a private professional doctor, assisting him both in criminal scenes and personal life.
In this movie, the protagonist Watney is a man with the same trait for he spent about 500 days in the Mars all by himself and successfully farmed handsome potatoes as his ration with his own shit and recreated water. In addition, he also managed to keep his life in check, rationing the left food rationally and implementing his own rescue plan with a very far-sighted vision. Nobody could imagine half a thousand days' time living in another planet alone - you don't even get a plant to talk with, letting alone a dog that you can take a walk with. So how Watney nailed it? He talked to the cameras. On the one hand, I think it's a brilliant idea to kill the leisure time and make a memory tape (a not bad gift for oneself in the future, which can remind one of those golden, old days back in Mars, quite a sick stuff, right?), on the other hand, it could help him maintain his language proficiency and mental stability. Although no one has run an experiment to test language degeneration under such condition (keep not using words in 500 days), the result is actually plain in the day light - more or less, one's language proficiency would incline and the chances that one would go mad is quite fat. Just as the saying goes: "If you rest, you rust." After ruminating on those odds and ends, I'm totally touched by Watnery's wry sense of humor in the face of the extreme circumstance there. So, let's applaud hard and crisp for there's another man's name shown in my hero list.
To be continued...
A bunch of screenshots from the movie is attached in the following. The translation gave me a good laugh and pleasure today, so I hope they could do the same trick to you as well.
May we all can cultivate a strong and unbreakable inner self and prosper in the outer, ducking fabulous world.
