Director: Ridley Scott
Runtime: 141 minutes
For a movie about terrifying circumstances, Ridley Scott's The Martian has something you wouldn't normally expect: a sincere, deeply-entrenched air of optimism. Without straining too hard for 'feel-good' moments, Scott's adaptation of Andy Weir's best-selling novel is an exhilarating adventure because it refuses to get bogged down in existential crises. Seeing as how many of Scott's films are laced with either fatalism or downright nihilism, there is something truly invigorating in seeing the 77 year old make a movie that is basically a love letter to human ingenuity.
Set several decades in the future, The Martian wastes no time in dropping us off on the Red Planet and getting the ball rolling. Hardly a few minutes have gone by before a high-spirited NASA team is forced to abandon their mission and set course for Earth. But in the chaos of their escape (the cause of which is a colossal Martian storm), astronaut Mark Watney (Matt Damon) is struck by debris, and left for dead. Which, of course, he isn't.
There are so many points in the first act of Drew Goddard's screenplay that look like gateways to despair. Will we anguish with the NASA crew over their inability to rescue their colleague before take off? Will Mark Watney spend his final days on Mars pondering the meaning of life millions of miles away from home? The answer to both prompts is a resounding and triumphant 'No.' From the moment Watney drags himself back to base camp, he's on the go, thinking of what he has to do to survive long enough for the next NASA mission to reach Mars.
Scott - along with editor Pietro Scalia and cinematographer Dariusz Wolski - plunges headfirst into Watney's enthusiasm, to the film's great benefit. For a director who has long been regarded as a visual craftsman, he has scaled back rather marvelously. This is not a pretty or lush film, even with all of the sleek sets. It's an immersive, get-your-hands dirty endeavor that, like Mark Watney, likes to simply get the job done. The film may lack obvious moments of cinematic innovation or poetry, but it still thrills as an expertly calibrated and engagingly old-fashioned crowdpleaser.
Better yet, it's a crowdpleaser with actual smarts. The Martian is a tribute to human perseverance, but it's also a gushing ode to the unifying power of scientific progress. Characters throw around plenty of technical talk, but the smooth editing and dynamic performances (even the smallest roles are filled by actors who seem thrilled to be involved) erase the possibility of the film turning into a NASA training video.
First and foremost, The Martian would not work as well as it does without Damon's performance. Mark Watney can be a bit of a smart ass, but Damon keeps the character grounded, and nails all of Goddard's one-liners and off-the-cuff remarks. Even when facing life or death odds, the characters in The Martian still have room for laughter. Damon's co-stars all bring their charisma, ranging from Jessica Chastain's guilt-ridden commander to Kristen Wiig as NASA's prickly head of PR.
Yet none of these characters are especially well-rounded, and that includes Mark. And yet The Martian proves to be such rousing entertainment because it balances a cast of one-note characters with a smart sense of its story's stakes. There isn't too much to write about any of the individuals on screen, but we can sense their intelligence, their drive, and their desire to succeed and survive. Scott's latest cinematic foray into space hasn't produced another Ellen Ripley, and that's perfectly fine. What matters is that he's assembled a cast of charismatic actors who make for solid stand-ins for humanity as a whole. The Martian may start as Mark Watney's story, but it ends as joyous statement of what humanity is capable of when the lines between individuals and entire communities vanish in the name of survival. The dangers of space are terrifying, but The Martian reminds us that in the face of overwhelming odds, sometimes the perfect antidote is just a touch of optimism.
Grade: B+
Director: Craig Zobel
Runtime: 95 minutes
The last thing anyone needs after surviving the apocalypse is to get stuck in a love triangle. Who has time for all of that drama when basic sustenance is a daily question mark? The answer, frustratingly, comes down to the last three people on earth. Two men. One woman. One isolated slice of untouched American Eden. That takes care of the who, but not the why. Director Craig Zobel, working with Nissar Modi to adapt Robert C. O'Brien's novel, answer the first question with flying colors. But when it comes time to dredge up the old love triangle and really make us care, they fall short, thereby stranding a trio of talented actors in a romantic drama that barely elicits more than a hollow, "so what?"
Ann Burden (Margot Robbie) spends her days tending to her family farm, which survived the unexplained death of mankind, and getting supplies from the nearby town in the valley below. Yet while Ann can roam about her family's territory in peace, descending from the ancestral perch requires putting on a makeshift hazmat suit and gas mask. Ann seems content in her isolation, until she encounters John Loomis (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a government researcher sealed inside an experimental radiation-proof suit. The initial awkwardness (which here means "guns drawn, voices elevated") passes, and the pair begin to try and build a life together based on trust.
In his opening act, Zobel demonstrates a solid command of the story, the characters, and the overall atmosphere at hand. Gorgeous landscape shots lend an otherworldly aura to Burden Valley, simultaneously emphasizing the location's innocence and its borders with vast expanses of rotten land. There's also a nice visual homage to Tarkovsky's Stalker, though the scene in Zobel's film ultimately comes across as padding.
And speaking of looks, Robbie and Ejiofor don't look so bad themselves, despite just barely limping past humanity's expiration date. The first half hour contains hardly a trace of love or lust, and instead puts its energy toward exploring the fundamental differences of Ann and John's mindsets. Ann is still a devout Christian, determined to be as kind and humble as possible, while John has a rather blunt, mathematically driven point of view. He offers to build a water wheel to help generate power for Ann's home, but has to watch his step once he proposes using the wood from the Burden chapel as material.
Though not without its minor hiccups, Z for Zachariah starts off promisingly, using its post-apocalyptic setting to tell a story about loss and loneliness, rather than just another zombie-filled splatter fest. But then the first awkward arrives and plants the seed of potential romance. The dialogue, not the film's strong suit to begin with, dips in quality. The actors are not tasked with saying anything overwrought, but the words gradually become clumsily arranged. Modi's screenplay has a habit of putting certain developments so close together that there's no time for them to acquire genuine meaning. When certain interactions occur, it feels as if we're watching a painfully condensed version of what was supposed to be a much longer scene.
The arrival of Chris Pine's Caleb does little to help the film, other than adding another attractive face. Ann struggles to adapt to having another guest, and Z for Zachariah fumbles even more in acclimating to a third character. To his credit, Pine makes you wish that Caleb was a more prominent part of the story, investing the role with both mystery and aw-shucks folksiness.
But with the narrative already struggling to find the right balance for the Ann-John dynamic, Caleb's arrival only further upsets the story's foundation. Both sides of the "courtship" that takes place are halfhearted. This wouldn't be a huge issue considering the post-apocalyptic backdrop, but the urgency of the situation never materializes. Ann could choose John, Caleb, or both. But her decision doesn't really carry much weight. Big decisions are certainly made in the film's final act, but the cumulative impact of these choices is as empty as the land beyond Ann's farm. Envy the dead of Z for Zachariah, for at least they never had to experience such aimless frustration.
Grade: C
Director: Steve McQueen
Runtime: 133 minutes
When a movie has you doubting its quality for its first half hour, it tends to send up more than a few red flags. That was the experience I had with Steve McQueen's third feature film, 12 Years a Slave. All of the festival hype about this being a masterpiece didn't even seem remotely present. Yet over the course of its grueling duration, the movie has a way of getting under your skin long before you fully realize it. This is a film that rights itself so powerfully that it manages to meet, and possibly surpass, its overwhelming hype.
Arriving nearly a year after Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained, Slave is quick to position itself as a polar opposite. Tarantino's take on slavery was brutal, but so stylized that it quickly arrived at winking hyperbole. That tongue-in-cheek revisionism is nowhere to be found in McQueen's film, which sternly cements itself as one of the definitive cinematic portraits of the horrors of American slavery.
Yet for all of the brutality, emotional and physical, on display, 12 Years a Slave's approach is remarkably restrained. McQueen, working off of John Ridley's adaptation of the novel of the same title, has ample opportunity to bludgeon the viewer into numbing submission. As we follow Solomon Northrup (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a free man captured and sold into the southern slavery machine, we are witness to unspeakable violence, as expected. But rather than reflect Northrup's own horror, the film spends most of its time depicting its atrocities with quiet detachment. Rarely has the concept of the banality of evil been so maturely transferred to the silver screen.
The effect is distancing at first, and it can make 12 Years a Slave difficult to fully engage with at times. There are moments made to elicit gasps of horror, but also any number of scenes presented so matter-of-factly that they appear determined to keep the viewer at arm's length. It's a strategy that could have proved damning in the long run. Instead, it all builds to a finale that packs what has to be the biggest emotional wallop of the year, and by quite a wide margin.
The academically rigorous treatment that takes up most of the runtime is, secretly, the key to the film's success. By refusing to indulge in exploitation and wallowing in awfulness, the story clips along, capturing evil as ordinarily as possible, as though it were just another part of the day. The intelligence with which Ridley treats his characters, coupled with McQueen's vision, allow the film to work as an accessibly arty drama, as well as an honest and unflinching portrait of one of the biggest travesties in American history.
And as the glue holding the story together, Mr. Ejiofor is tremendous, infusing Solomon with hope, determination, and despair without mugging. The middle of the story sees Solomon - with a new name, and reduced to little more than a cotton picker - as an observer and occasional victim. Rather than slip into laziness, Ejiofor infuses Solomon's defeated passivity with a tragic grace that only becomes more impressive as time passes.
While Ejiofor carries the movie on his shoulders, he allows his co-stars the bulk of the film's flashier moments. As Mr. and Mrs. Epps, Michael Fassbender and Sarah Paulson make up one of the most despicable, yet frighteningly believable, couples in recent memory. Whatever their quarrels with each other, they have no problem abusing and manipulating the slaves as a means of attacking each other. As Mr. Epps watches, with mocking delight, his slaves dance, his wife catches him eyeing young Patsey (Lupita Nyong'o, also excellent). Her retaliation is to pick up a glass decanter and toss it at the girl's head, with all of the effort of tossing paper into a waste bin. It's a moment horrifying for its basic cruelty, the chillingly casual manner of its depiction, and implications it has about the Epps' worldviews. That the moment lasts but 10 seconds only magnifies the scene's blunt force.
At this point it almost seems pointless to point out the films flaws, considering how contained they are to the beginning of the movie. However, though the initial missteps don't undercut the power of the conclusion, they do start the film off in a puzzling manner that feels at odds with what follows.
Rather than proceed in strictly linear fashion, the opening begins with a few vignettes of Solomon already on the Epps' plantation. Later, the film inserts brief flashbacks to Northrup's time with his wife and two children as they go about their life as free and respected members of society. The "payoff" that this structure delivers is little more than a condensed repeat of the opening scenes in a bizarre attempt to generate a moment of psychological tension. Compared with the elegant frankness of the film's majority, these moments can't help but feel rough around the edges. Hans Zimmer's early scoring contributions don't help matters, and threaten to send certain scenes careening off of the rails with their horror movie intensity.
Thankfully, 12 Years a Slave's triumphs do more than make up for its failures. They absolutely demolish them. With all of the accumulated pain and suffering built up over the course of more than two hours, the film arrives at its shattering conclusion. It's an otherworldly combination of hopefulness about the story's end, as well as a cathartic end to a profoundly wrenching journey. McQueen's film could derisively be deemed his broadest and most accessible. However, by tapping into such a difficult subject matter with such precision, he has delivered a challenging, gripping story by staring evil in the eye and never once backing down.
Grade: A-
