If I had to pick one film to rework in order to say something about how media shapes our expectations of leadership, I would choose The Martian. Not because it is a bad example. Because it is a good one, and the interesting problems only show up in films that are already trying.

Plenty of films are easy targets. You can point at them, note that every engineer and every executive on screen is a man, and the analysis is finished before it starts. The Martian is more useful precisely because it does better than that, and looking closely at where it still falls into an old pattern tells you more than any obvious failure would.

What the Film Already Gets Right

The single most important fact about representation in The Martian is one that is easy to forget while watching it: Melissa Lewis commands the mission. She is the captain of Ares III. Every decision made aboard the Hermes runs through her, including the one to defy NASA and go back for a stranded crew member. Beth Johanssen, the crew's system operator, handles the technical work the ship depends on.

What makes this work is that the film never stops to congratulate itself about it. Nobody remarks on Lewis being a woman in command. Nobody has to earn the audience's acceptance of it through a speech. She simply commands, the crew simply follows, and the story moves on. That is what normalised representation actually looks like, and it is a genuinely higher bar than the one most films clear.

The Pattern Underneath

So if the film handles its commander that well, where is the problem? It is not that women are absent. It is what the women on the ground are given to do.

Read those two columns next to each other and the split is not about presence. It is about verbs. The women observe and communicate. The men decide and invent. Mindy Park's defining moment is spotting something. Rich Purnell's defining moment is solving something. Both are necessary to the plot, and only one of them is the kind of scene an audience remembers as brilliance.

Annie Montrose is the sharpest version of this. She is confident, senior, and very good at her job, and her job is explaining decisions she had no part in making. She stands between the institution and the public, which puts her adjacent to every important moment in the film and inside none of them.

What a Perceptual Set Actually Is

The reason this matters more than one film's casting is a fairly well-established idea in psychology: a perceptual set. Stripped of the terminology, it describes the way repeated exposure quietly trains what you expect something to look like, before you have consciously thought about it at all.

You do not decide to form a perceptual set. That is the whole point of it. It is assembled out of hundreds of small impressions, none of which seemed significant on its own, and it does its work in the half-second before deliberate thought arrives. Which means it is not built by the films that are obviously biased and easy to dismiss. It is built by the ones you enjoyed and did not examine.

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Nobody is persuaded by a single film. That is not how this works. You are shaped by the hundredth one that quietly repeated the same arrangement as the ninety-nine before it.

Ali Abdisalam Hussein

The Scene I Would Change

I would change the Rich Purnell sequence. It is the film's marquee moment of individual brilliance, the point where a junior astrodynamicist works out a slingshot trajectory that nobody senior had considered, and then has to convince a room full of directors to take it seriously.

It is a wonderful scene, and it is the cleanest possible test of the argument. If the only version of that beat audiences ever see is a man arriving at the insight, then that is the image attached to the feeling of watching someone be the smartest person in the building. In my cut, the person who works out the maneuver is a woman, and everything else about the scene stays exactly as written.

I would extend the same logic to the crisis meetings around it. Not by adding people to the room, but by changing who talks once they are in it. The women present would carry technical decisions, mission strategy, risk assessment and the final call, with no scene acknowledging that anything unusual is happening.

The Scene I Would Cut, and the Trap in Cutting It

My first instinct was to cut the shots where women are visible in the room while the substantive discussion happens entirely between men. That instinct is wrong, and it is worth explaining why, because it is an easy mistake to make.

If you cut the shot, you have not fixed the imbalance. You have removed the women from the frame and reduced their screen presence to solve a problem about their screen presence. The issue was never that they were in the room. It was that being in the room was all they were given. The remedy is lines, not scissors.

So what I would actually cut is narrower: the sequences that position Annie Montrose as the person who manages public perception of decisions made without her. I would reassign that screen time to a woman inside the decision itself. Same minutes on screen, moved from the corridor into the room.

This Is Not Inclusion for Its Own Sake

It would be easy to read all of this as adjusting a cast list to satisfy a quota, and I want to be precise about why it is not. Nothing in my version requires the story to bend. The science stays intact, the tension stays intact, the survival plot is untouched. Every change is about who is holding the authority in a scene that was going to happen anyway.

The claim is not that The Martian did something wrong. It is that a film already willing to put a woman in command of a Mars mission, and to treat that as unremarkable, had every opportunity to apply the same standard on the ground, and did not quite. It got the harder half right and defaulted on the easier one.

Why It Is Worth Bothering

There is a version of this argument that overstates its case, and I would rather not make it. No remake changes how anyone thinks. Films are not instructions, audiences are not passive, and one adjusted scene does not undo whatever expectations a person walked into the cinema carrying.

But perceptual sets are built out of accumulation, and accumulation is made of individual contributions that each looked too small to matter. The useful question is not whether one film can shift what an audience expects a senior engineer to look like. It is which side of the accumulation that film chose to add itself to.

The more ordinary it becomes to see women deciding and inventing rather than noticing and explaining, the less work any individual film has to do. That is the whole mechanism. Not persuasion, just repetition pointed somewhere better.