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| Directed by Ridley Scott Written by Drew Goddard |
Alo Party Peoples.
Go see it. Just, go see it. Why are you still here? Why aren't you driving or on a bus or walking or anything to get yourself in a theater to see this movie? The Martian is one of the best films of the year!
Have a ni-
-Seriosuly though, I wish I could end things right there. The Martian is such a lean, tight, deceptively simple film that it's actually pretty hard to talk about. The Martian is this year's Gravity, a big, gorgeous crowd pleasing thriller that gets to come out in awards season because it doubles as a high-concept character piece. That rarest of events where mainstream audiences and professional critics are 100% on the same page.
It's the near-ish future, and Matt Damon is Mark Watney, a botanist participating in a manned expedition to Mars when a sandstorm forces the crew to abandon the planet. During the evacuation, he gets hit by a piece of flying debris, and he is thought dead as the crew heads back to Earth. A few hours later, Mark wakes up, stumbles back to his habitat, and sets out figuring out how to contact NASA and survive long enough to hitch a ride home with the next Mars mission. Meanwhile, NASA mission control is dealing with the public relations fallout of leaving a man to die on a barren inhospitable rock when they find evidence of Watney's survival, and they scramble to put together a rescue mission and contact him with advice on how to survive the four years it would take for them to get there, all while the rest of the crew are constantly grieving over him as they rocket back towards Earth. It's Castaway in space with liberal doses of Gravity and Apollo 13 mixed in for good measure, and the results are simply electric.
Director Ridley Scott; the visionary behind Alien, Blade Runner, Gladiator, Black Hawk Down- you get the idea - has reclaimed his stature as one of the great American film makers after his last few films had failed to impress. If The Martian didn't work, I was completely ready to brush him off as a filmmaker of note; he still had technical skill to rival the best, but he had seemingly lost sight of how to use those skills to tell a compelling story, and he was simply lost in the details. The Martian fixes this by only covering the essentials of what it has to in order to get the plot across in simple, clear-cut punctual fashion. He's going to run out of food soon, he has to find a way to grow food from potatoes that were sent up with him, here's how he does that. He needs to contact NASA, he knows there's an old probe within driving distance of his rover that he can salvage, here's how he does that. A bunch of guys on Earth need to get him off Mars, they need to do lots of complicated math to get him off Mars, here's how they do it. There's a guy, he's stuck on Mars, he has to get off Mars, he doesn't have much time, here's how he does that.
Director Ridley Scott; the visionary behind Alien, Blade Runner, Gladiator, Black Hawk Down- you get the idea - has reclaimed his stature as one of the great American film makers after his last few films had failed to impress. If The Martian didn't work, I was completely ready to brush him off as a filmmaker of note; he still had technical skill to rival the best, but he had seemingly lost sight of how to use those skills to tell a compelling story, and he was simply lost in the details. The Martian fixes this by only covering the essentials of what it has to in order to get the plot across in simple, clear-cut punctual fashion. He's going to run out of food soon, he has to find a way to grow food from potatoes that were sent up with him, here's how he does that. He needs to contact NASA, he knows there's an old probe within driving distance of his rover that he can salvage, here's how he does that. A bunch of guys on Earth need to get him off Mars, they need to do lots of complicated math to get him off Mars, here's how they do it. There's a guy, he's stuck on Mars, he has to get off Mars, he doesn't have much time, here's how he does that.
If Ridley Scott was still in the mindset that spawned Exodus: Gods and Kings, this would have come across as cold, inhuman, and combined with the considerable amount of technical jargon, it would have fallen victim to the same affliction as Interstellar; where the film makers were clearly so concerned with showing their work on the science that you'd think they were worried that Stephen Hawking would bust into the editing room and demand to see their figures.
Scott gets past this by playing the visuals in the exact opposite direction. He frames the vast imposing Martian landscape, huge imposing sandstorms, and Mark's dark, claustrophobic, inhumanly grey habitat so well that you can't help but feel the emotions gushing hot and powerful through every expertly painted frame of Scott's Red Planet. You could teach a class on this movie- hell, you could teach a class with this movie, and not just because it is easily the most scientifically accurate major sci-fi production in recent memory.
The Martian is simply incredible. Every moment is gripping, every line lands with perfect precision, every scene incredible. It is one of the best films of the year, a great thriller, a great character study, and an instant classic of modern science fiction. It's one of those movies you just have to see so you can say you did, do not miss it.
Have a nice day.
Greg.B
FINAL RATING: 5/5
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