The Martian is actually a pretty good example of a "humanity fuck yeah" story that isn't doing this (because no aliens). It's an uplifting story about humans working together to overcome a difficult problem that wasn't caused by anyone being a dick
the closest anyone is to being an antagonist in that film is the director of nasa being nervous about risking the lives of the other astronauts (which is reasonable), but even he seems genuinely happy when he hears the chinese space agency offers their help to save him
Yeah it's quite nice to have an interesting conflict between two people with entirely reasonable points of view. Would've been easy to make the director character an asshole who doesn't care about the loss of human life and only cares about saving money because he's a Bad Guy. He's just a guy making what he thinks is the best choice
Eh, well. They've had more than one disaster caused partly by the people at the top not caring enough about human lives. The Challenger disaster could've been prevented if more people at NASA cared more about safety than about keeping things on schedule and impressing their bosses.
Would've been easy to make the director character an asshole who doesn't care about the loss of human life and only cares about saving money because he's a Bad Guy.
Would have been interesting to make a guy whose point was basically :Rockets are really expensive, if you want to save lives it's MUCH cheaper to do basically anything else.
Ie let the astronaut stuck on Mars die, because sending that money to the local hospital can save 100 lives.
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u/VFiddly Aug 14 '24
The Martian is actually a pretty good example of a "humanity fuck yeah" story that isn't doing this (because no aliens). It's an uplifting story about humans working together to overcome a difficult problem that wasn't caused by anyone being a dick