It Turns Out That ‘The Martian’ Was a Comedy After All

Years before the “Is The Bear actually a comedy?” debate, there was similar controversy concerning the questionable hilariousness of a movie in which Matt Damon is stranded on Mars and grows potatoes in his own poop. 

Despite being largely marketed as a dramatic sci-fi thriller, in 2016, The Martian won the Golden Globe award for Best Motion Picture Musical, Musical or Comedy. Since Damon never once breaks into song during the two-and-a-half hour run time, seemingly it was submitted for the awards show as a comedy.

This led to accusations that 20th Century Fox had committed “category fraud” by labeling a non-comedy as a comedy in order to steer clear of the more competitive drama category. A number of comedic filmmakers seemed pretty ticked off about this at the time. Paul Feig, whose action-movie parody Spy was up against The Martian, tweeted: “A comedy’s a film whose #1 goal is to make people laugh. If that wasn’t the filmmakers’ top goal, it’s not a comedy.” 

Judd Apatow’s Trainwreck was also nominated in the same category, and he bluntly posted: “Trying to dominate the comedy category when you are really a drama (that is) afraid of dramatic competition is a punk move.”

Even director Ridley Scott seemed to agree, he openly questioned the categorization during his acceptance speech at the Globes, asking “Comedy?” before launching into his speech.

Now, nine years later, Scott has changed his tune, and is claiming that The Martian really was a comedy, all along.

During a recent director roundtable hosted by The Hollywood Reporter, Nickel Boys director RaMell Ross asked Scott about The Martian, specifically whether or not it was more expensive to make than an actual Mars rover. Scott said that it merely cost “about $80 million” to produce. But he did note that the studio let the project sit on the shelf for two years because they “didn’t realize it’s actually a comedy.” And apparently, The Martian’s humor was the main reason that Scott wanted to take on the job: “They said, ‘Do you want to look at this?’ And I read it and said, ‘It’s really funny.’”

Clearly Scott doesn’t give a shit about whether or not people think that his 10-year-old movie was deserving of an award everybody’s already forgotten about, so presumably his comments are completely genuine. 

So was The Martian really a comedy?

Matt Damon has a few vaguely funny lines, considering that he’s playing an astronaut in the midst of a traumatic incident. Like, Tom Hanks never talked about his balls during Apollo 13:

Or paused to complain about disco music:

Multiple times:

Also the supporting cast features comedy stars like Kristen Wiig and Donald Glover, who hadn’t starred in many dramas at the time:

But neither of them are really all that funny in the movie. Although Glover does randomly fall over at one point. I guess that’s kind of funny?

Clearly, The Martian was going for a comedic tone, but it may not have succeeded in making people laugh so much as it succeeded in making them not want to see the guy from Good Will Hunting starve to death in space.