Why "The Martian"? Because... Science!!!

Every time I sit down to do one of these essays about a film from Sir Ridley Scott, I feel like I’m obligated to inform the reader that he or she may need to take my opinions with a grain of salt.  My fandom of Sir Ridley’s work is well-documented, and I wouldn’t blame anybody if they said my objectivity in reviewing his movies may be questionable. I like to believe that I can be reasonable enough, however, to acknowledge that he’s had some “misses” over the last decade (cough… The Counselor… cough… Prometheus… cough... ), but even those misses have had things about them to love and/or admire, though, and those qualities keep me eagerly anticipating whatever he may do next.  

Thankfully, with The Martian, Sir Ridley has hit one out of the proverbial park, and has produced a film that certainly ranks right up alongside his best work.  It is a great combination of survival story (see a guy figure out how to grow potatoes in his own poop!), detective story (wait, that photo and this photo must mean somebody’s still moving down there!) and heart-tugging rescue story (can they catch the guy in a space suit moving faster than speeding train?).

The Martian is based on the debut novel from former software engineer Andy Weir, written out of his love for all things science, and his admiration of the men and women who practice it and utilize it to explore the universe. The story is of astronaut/botanist Mark Watney (played with great charm by Matt Damon), who is left for dead on the surface of Mars when his mission is scrubbed because of a violent storm.  Left with supplies that will only last six weeks, he must find a way to not only communicate with Earth and hope a rescue mission can be sent, but also to find a way to produce enough food, water and breathable air to last the three or more years it would take for that mission to save him.  

While there is certainly enough of the Robinson Crusoe-type stuff one would expect to find in such a story, there is enough of the subsequent activities on Earth depicted that the movie is not just a retread of Cast Away set in space.  NASA comes to realize Watney has survived and struggle to find a way to deal with that knowledge and plan a course of action.  Astronauts make plans, engineers at Jet Propulsion Labs struggle to implement them, NASA administrators work to make them happen, all under the pressure of knowing Watney may very well starve to death before they can get to him. These portions of the film are filled with characters just as interesting (in their own ways) as Watney, and the movie is fortunate to be filled with such wonderful actors as Jeff Daniels, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Jessica Chastain and Michael Pena in these roles, all of whom do fantastic jobs of creating believable characters with clear motivations, all with the seemingly-limited screen time they have.

Okay, sure, we all know Mars’ atmosphere is way too thin to actually produce a storm strong enough to endanger any manned mission there (or at least those of us who didn’t sleep through eleventh-grade science class know - you all know you you are…), but any enjoyment of a movie must require some suspension of disbelief, and this great story makes it easy for us to do so.   The genius of The Martian is its handling of what is, by its nature, the most technical of human endeavors and keeping it on a level the layman can not only understand, but enjoy.  What made the novel so incredibly interesting - it’s descriptions of the methods Watney used to engineer the solutions to his problems - could have been the very thing to doom the movie adaptation for general audiences, but Drew Goddard’s script does a fantastic job of feeding us just enough science-lingo to explain what Watney is doing without bogging us down in minutia (“I’ve done the math,” an engineer explains to an administrator at one point, “it checks out”).  The entire narrative thread of the movie is propelled by this problem-solving, which is a pretty novel thing for a movie in today’s age of the big-screen shoot-’em-up spectacle that relies on action set pieces to move from one plot point to another.  

The focus of the story, though, is Watney, and Matt Damon gives a us stellar performance.  He tends to be a “quiet” actor, steering clear of roles that would require him to be bombastic or over-the-top (I’m looking at you, Sean Penn…), and this role suits him well.  Characters he portrays tend to be more reserved and rely more on emotion and body language to convey ideas, and his spin on Mark Watney is dead-on perfect for that philosophy. Watney is what we all hope we could be in such a situation, and his performance of the character is pitch-perfect.  He combats the despair of his situation not only with rational thinking, but also with wit and humor, both cleverly shown to us by means of the video logs he keeps.  Despite being more physically alone than any human being ever has, he never totally loses hope, although he does come close a time or two, as I’m sure we all would.

As I mentioned earlier, Sir Ridley has had some less-than-stellar work in theaters over the last ten years (although even those films tend to improve when he re-cuts them for home video, which could easily be the subject of another lengthy essay), but no matter what one’s opinion may be about the narrative quality of any of those movies, I defy anyone to say that his movies aren’t always beautiful to watch.  The Martian is no exception. Utilizing the region of Jordan where parts of Lawrence of Arabia were shot more than fifty years ago, along with some help from post-production color-correction, he has created an incredibly believable Mars.  His directing skills are firing on all cylinders here, and his visual choices tell us as much as the script’s words do.  Time after time, he is moving us from lush, panoramic shot of beautiful Martian landscape, to an object presenting a challenge, to a facial expression telling us all we need to know about that challenge.

You may think the plot sounds as though is not terribly different from Cast Away or Robinson Crusoe or Gravity, but the character of Mark Watney IS original.  It’s easy to say that this is a Marooned-in-Space movie, and in a way it is, but it is so much more than that.  It is a story of personality.  It is a story of perseverance.  It is a story of how calm, rational thinking can eventually overcome most any problem.  It is a story of how even those calm, rational thinkers still have emotion and must factor that into their decisions.

...and it’s Ridley Scott’s best movie in a decade, so it’s got that going for it, too.

Christopher Nolan's "Interstellar" is both a feast for the eyes and food for thought

Barring the outbreak of World War Four or another round of some Black Plague-like pandemic that might thin out the human population a bit, the day when Mankind must address the question of depleting the Earth's resources will certainly come.  I personally think it will come much, much farther down the road than most of the more fervent Environmentalist-Wackos claim it will, but I agree that it will happen someday.  What Mankind will do as that day approaches is the central question of Christopher Nolan's Interstellar.  Would Mankind look outwards to the stars to find a new home, possibly sacrificing ourselves and the lives of everyone we know in order to prevent our extinction, or would we be unable to put aside our own individual lives in order for our unknown descendants to have lives of their own?  

As I am childless, I cannot make any claim of being able to relate to the dilemma faced by Interstellar's main character.  I would suppose the scenario of knowing you may never see your child again, but that child and his/her offspring may live full lives versus remaining with your child while knowing he/she will not live very long would be fairly obvious - of course, you want your child to have the longest, fullest life possible, even at the cost of your own life.  At the risk of sounding pessimistic, though, I personally don't have enough faith in the ability of Mankind as a whole to be selfless enough to choose Mankind's survival over the survival of one's own immediate family.  I happen to believe that individuals, given the opportunity, will choose a self-serving course of action over one for the "Greater Good" 99.99% of the time, give or take a percentage point or two.  While I leave the question of whether I am right or wrong in that belief for some other essay, some of the characters in Interstellar seem to share my grim assessment of people's priorities.  However, I do find Interstellar to be a very hopeful, positive outlook on how some people in particular, and Mankind in general, may face that problem when it arises. 

The film shows us a time in our near-future, perhaps later this century, perhaps a bit farther off than that, when Humanity has all but exhausted the soil of Mother Earth.  Crops are no longer yielding enough to keep us alive, and the depleted soil billows in clouds of dust that create a new Dust Bowl era - one that stretches a bit farther than the American Midwest this time around (perhaps we could call this the "Eco-pocalypse").  A family consisting of a former NASA pilot named Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), his fairly-grounded son, his head-in-the-clouds daughter named Murphy (as in Murphy's Law) and his father-in-law struggle to raise corn in the weak Texas soil.  An almost divine-appearing set of happenings and coincidences lead Cooper and Murphy to the hidden location of a now-underground NASA, as the space agency is now an off-the-record government agency.  In this future, the ignorant tax-paying masses demand their tax dollars be spent on needs more pressing to them than space exploration, but thankfully, a few more deeper-thinking folks still believe the subject to be important, so the work continues in secret.  

NASA is now conveniently headed by one of Cooper's former teachers, one Professor Brand, (played by Nolan's own little good-luck charm, Michael Caine), who fairly quickly convinces Cooper to pilot an exploratory mission into a conveniently-placed Einstein–Rosen bridge ("wormhole") near Saturn that leads to habitable planets in another galaxy, in order to find a new home for Mankind.  Leaving his family behind, Cooper, along with Brand's own physicist/astronaut daughter (Anne Hathaway), two other scientists and a couple of sarcastic robots, begins a decades-long mission into the wormhole.  By the end of the film, we see how all of those cosmic coincidences and lucky breaks fell into place, and how Mankind may ultimately play a part in its own salvation.

Much like Stanley Kubrick's masterpiece of science fiction/science prediction, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Interstellar is a story that begins with the question of what Mankind must do when we have reached a point in our evolution where we've gone as far as we can without becoming something else.  In the same vein as 2001, cosmic occurrences are placed in Mankind's path by unseen/unknown entities that act as motivators to drive Mankind to move forward when we seem to have lost the drive to do so on our own.  Unlike 2001, a fairly emotionally-sterile film by design, the notion of love as a force of nature, one that can affect not only decision-making, but actually play a part in natural occurrence, comes into play in this story.  More so than in any of his other previous films, Nolan uses the dynamic of family love as a driving factor, as we see how Cooper's relationship with both of his children suffer as they grow to adulthood without him, and how Professor Brand's own daughter believes her love for others might be a factor in the mission's direction.

Nolan and his screenwriter brother Jonathan share credit for the screenplay, and their script does a phenomenal job of balancing such things as explanations of quantum physics with emotional insight into the human beings explaining them.  Maintaining the emotional power of the story among the fantastic visual effects is also attributable to the performances of the cast delivering the soul of that script, some of whom make the most of limited screen time.  Casey Affleck and Jessica Chastain in particular, who portray the Cooper children in adulthood, both give powerful performances with their relatively little screen time, effectively conveying in different ways how abandoned they feel, and how their lives, along with the rest of Mankind, seem to be slowly spiraling to a halt as the Earth dies around them.  

Interstellar, much like Gravity from last year, uses its superb visual effects to emphasize the emotional impact of its story in a marvelous fashion.  I didn't find any of the effects sequences to be self-indulgent, and even more remarkable for a film with an almost-three hour running time, the effects never seem to overwhelm the movie's message.  The sound design in particular was Oscar-worthy, in my humble layman's opinion - the silence of space, then the abrupt thunder of ill-happenings when atmosphere is introduced, laid out in the 360-degree realm that is zero-gravity was fantastic.  The sound mix, however, had a few hiccups, as a few lines of dialogue were overwhelmed by the effects around the character speaking, but I suppose that could have been a case of McConaughey mumbling much like he does in those Lincoln commercials...

I have a list of filmmakers in my mind, composed of directors whose work will get me to buy a ticket, no matter what it is, and Christopher Nolan's name is on that list.  Much like he did with Inception, Nolan has created something that accomplishes a task that is much easier said than done - a movie that both greatly entertains me and forces me to spend several hours afterwards thinking very deeply about a subject. If there is anyone making films these days who can legitimately claim to be the heir-apparent to Stanley Kubrick, it is Nolan, and I do not say that solely because Interstellar may very well be this generation's 2001.  It is not the equal of that film, but it is certainly worthy of being included in any conversation along with it, and it is definitely one of the best films of this year.

No one should try to defy "Gravity"

As wonderful a genre as science fiction is, 99.9% of movies made under that label lean a lot more heavily on the “fiction” part than the “science,” so it’s a rare treat when we get one that relies on some scientific fact-based scenarios to produce dramatic effect.  When pitching 2001: A Space Odyssey to MGM all those years ago, Stanley Kubrick said he wanted to produce the first “good” science-fiction film, with his definition of “good” being “believable,” as he wanted to tell a compelling story in a setting that could easily be our own world. Of course, he very famously did so, and the lack of similar efforts by other filmmakers through the years could be evidence of how difficult a task “realistic” science fiction is.

Alfonso Cauron’s Gravity, however, belongs in any discussion with Kubrick’s master-piece.  By saying such a thing, I don’t mean to imply that they are equals (2001 is such a unique film that almost anything will pale in comparison to it), but I do mean that Gravity is such an absolute technical marvel, like 2001, that its being a very good human story is like icing on the proverbial cake.

The film opens with an uninterrupted seventeen-minute take depicting a space shuttle repair mission to the Hubble Space Telescope.  Astronauts Matt Kowalski (George Clooney) and Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) are two members of the crew we see performing extra-vehicular activity (that’s space-walking to you and me) when NASA radios an emergency abort alert, as a field of debris from a destroyed Russian satellite is in a direct orbital path with their shuttle.  This cloud of metallic fragments travelling faster than any bullet ever could does indeed find them before they are able to change their orbital path, destroying the spacecraft and leaving Kowalski and Stone adrift in space.  What follows is an engrossing, fascinating story of loss, bravery and the discovery of a will to survive, told by Cauron in such a stunningly beautiful way that any audience member not feeling fear and anxiety, and happiness and joy, is almost certainly a fairly dark-hearted individual.  

By the end of the first act, Gravity essentially becomes a one-woman show, a story of a woman’s decision to survive, not only her current predicament, but her lonely, emotionally empty life in general.  Sandra Bullock’s performance is a statement that her Oscar win two years ago was no fluke, and I fully expect to see her name listed amongst the Best Actress nominees again come February. There are so many scenes in which she is the only character, and yet even without anyone to exchange dialogue, she conveys so much about Stone’s fear, and pain, and depression, that we know this character intimately by the time the film ends, and her fate is all the more emotionally impactful for it.

As amazing a story as Gravity is, the concept of a massive storm of orbital space debris could be the impetus for several other fascinating stories, as we could imagine how our society would react to a severe crippling of, if not outright elimination of, global telecom-munications that would result from such a scenario.  Imagine television and radio broad-casts being interrupted, international telephone calls being impossible, and internet connec-tivity being all but stopped.  Hell, the loss of world-wide Twitter access alone might be the beginning of Armageddon.  Cauron, to his credit, does not distract us from the story he chooses to tell, not even once, trusting his audience to understand how there’s a wave of chaos going on down on Earth, which makes the solitude of Bullock’s character all that much more profound.

At the risk of being repetitive, I’ll reiterate that Gravity is worth the price of admission as a visual treat alone.  Cauron’s use of computer-generated effects is extensive, but done with such great skill that not once are we under the misguided notion that we’re viewing some sci-fi space opera. Cauron’s lighting and camera movement constantly amazed me, and the moments of suspense and danger the astronauts faced got physical reactions from me that most movies can’t get out of me anymore.  Even the sound design of the film was fantastic, as we heard the radio transmissions from Earth differently when we were inside the astronauts’ helmets than we did when we were outside their suits (yes, you read that right - Cauron takes us all sorts of places in this film), and the silence of space is punctu-ated by the thuds and clunks that would be heard when the characters were in enclosed spaces with atmosphere.  

Now I did see Gravity in IMAX 3D, and yes, I’ve just raved and raved about how beautiful it was to watch, but I continue to believe this format to be a waste of a filmgoer’s money, and a lesser viewing experience than traditional two-dimensional film presentation.  With the ex-ception of Avatar, I’m yet to see a 3D film that didn’t have muddied or unbalanced colors, and I would even include Avatar when maintaining that the 3D effects have not yet added anything absolutely necessary to a story being told on-screen.  That being said, to each his own, and your tastes and experiences may differ, but I don’t think there’s really any debate needed when saying Gravity is the best picture of 2013 so far.