The Martian

Released:  October 2^nd, 2015

Rated:  PG-13

Distributor:  20^th Century Fox

Starring:  Matt Damon, Jessica Chastain, Kristen Wiig, Jeff Daniels, Michael Peña, Kate Mara, Sean Bean, Sebastian Stan, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Aksel Hennie

Directed by:  Ridley Scott

Written by:  Drew Goddard

Personal Bias Alert:  loved the book, likes the cast

7.5 of 10

            It must’ve been hard to decide on a release date for The Martian.  It staunchly doesn’t fit into traditional categories, proving far too light to be an awards season contender, too sciency to be a blockbuster, and too sprawling to be a thriller.  These oddities can be traced directly back to the book’s author, Andrew Weir, who first self-published the story chapter by chapter for free on his personal website.  Without the influence of editors or the publishing gristmill, Weir was free to craft the story as he pleased, and his chosen blend of hard science fiction with survival grind struck a chord with readers.  A legit publishing deal and a long stay on the New York Times bestseller list led to this most improbable situation:  a big-budget movie adaptation with an A-list cast and a legendary director.

            The story itself is a blend of the extraordinary and the mundane, following the world’s attempt to save an astronaut stranded on Mars.  It’s extraordinary to think of a man alone on an entire planet, while it’s mundane in the logistics and coordination.  This is a 100 million dollar movie that features a PR spokesperson, physics, chemistry, and potato farming.  It’s not edge-of-your-seat thrills, but for most of us, the endless strategy meetings and the small victories will hit closer to home than Ethan Hunt taking down mysterious international criminals.  Because of this familiarity, there’s moments in The Martian that hit you like an emotional sledgehammer, without warning making you realize how much you’ve connected with astronaut Mark Watney (Matt Damon).  This realism, a hallmark of hard science fiction, is the film’s greatest strength, and it’s something that audiences are clearly clamoring for.

            Coming in just behind this highlight is the extraordinary performance by Matt Damon.  He must pull off the smart, optimistically dark-humored astronaut with no one to play off of, not even a sentient computer like HAL or GERTY.  It’s hard to think of anyone besides Damon who could command the screen and make you care so deeply for a man without the manipulative trappings of a wife and kids left behind.  In fact, you only get a brief mention of his parents back home, and the connection you form with Watney is directly due to Damon’s vivacious performance.

            The rest of the star-studded cast breeze in and do their jobs, all of them correctly choosing to appear as average joes supporting the extraordinary Watney.  There’s almost no plot outside of the struggle to save the astronaut, which becomes both a strength and a weakness for the film.  The upside is that the story focuses on its strongest aspect:  the convoluted problems that must be worked through to even have a chance at saving him.  The downside is that there’s nothing to back that mystery up.  If, as many have, you’ve already read the book, then you’ll know all the solutions and problems that crop up along the way.  It’s still a pleasant ride to see it all play out, but without anything additional to sink your teeth into, the film feels a bit flat for long periods of time.  You’ll likely feel the same way if you attempt to watch the film multiple times, which will greatly affect the film’s staying power.

            Director Ridley Scott, who’s had lots of experience filming space movies, gives the film a solid if uninspired visual palette.  The rocky redness of Mars is occasionally beautiful, but in adhering to the book’s spirit of accuracy, the space stations were designed to look cleanly familiar.  As an offset to this occasional beauty, there’s also occasional stumbles on small things like the simulated weightlessness of space, evening out any high points and leaving Scott’s contributions rather unremarkable.  The visuals simply aren’t enough to demand rewatching, fitting in with the rest of the film’s one-off greatness.

            Most filmgoers will likely find The Martian to be a crowd-pleasing mystery populated by likable characters in an extraordinary setting.  They won’t catch on to the only other thing this film has to offer, which is a subtle love letter to space exploration and the wonders of science.  This element is much more prominent in the book, and as wonderful as it is that it remains here at all, its diminishment lessens the film as a whole.

Other Notes:

Ø  I’ve heard some pessimistic rumblings about the involvement of the Chinese space program.  This plot point is present in the book and serves to emphasize the cooperation that large scientific efforts encourage.  The fact that people don’t pick up on this proves how detrimental the downplayed pro-science stance becomes.

Ø  Drew Goddard was initially going to direct this.  I’m curious what his film would have looked like.

Ø  Spoiler alert:  Sean Bean doesn’t die.

Ø  That’s all I’ve got.  Now I need to go science the shit out of something.

Fantastic Four

Released:  August 7^th, 2015

Rated:  PG-13

Distributor:  Twentieth Century Fox

Starring:  Miles Teller, Michael B. Jordan, Kate Mara, Jamie Bell, Toby Kebbell, Reg E. Cathey

Directed by:  Josh Trank

Written by:  Simon Kinberg, Jeremy Slater, Josh Trank

Personal Bias Alert:  haven’t seen any previous Fantastic Four movies, likes the cast

4 of 10

            It’s not often that this big of a film completely lacks a purpose.  Many things have to go wrong to get such a product (a wobbly script, a director failing to impart his vision, misguided studio intervention, etc.), and it’s bold of Fox to so brazenly try to pass Fantastic Four as a decent movie.  Then again, a big-budget superhero flick can’t be buried with a pushed release date and minimal marketing like Sony Pictures did with Aloha, this year’s other conglomeration of scenes that was allegedly a movie.  Of course, Fantastic Four isn’t as big of a mess as Aloha; the individual scenes do make sense, they just never really go anywhere.

            The truly frustrating thing about this film is how great we all hoped it would be.  The cast for the superheroes and villain is a delectable slate of youngish talent that’ve had integral parts in many massively successful film and television projects, and the writer/director (who’s younger than some of his cast) was coming off a small-budget flick that impressed critics and viewers alike.  But alas, young talent can be unstable, and while the cast holds up their end, Josh Trank dropped the ball in nearly every way.  There’s reports of poor behavior and squabbles with the studio, but the finished product shows flaws that can be traced directly back to his pre-production decisions.

            The storyline that Trank seemed to be going for is depressingly familiar, almost an exact rehash of what he did in Chronicle.  Some young people discover their power (here, it’s science), their powers build until they become abusive and start harming themselves and others, then one of them becomes a bad guy that must be stopped by the rest of the group.  The fun that set apart Chronicle, though, was the comradery between the boys and a well-plotted descent that drew from each character’s background.  Trank, who didn’t write the actual screenplay for Chronicle, fails to bring this plotting and character development to Fantastic Four, leaving us with a bigger but lesser film.

            What Trank does manage to get right, at least for a while, is the young characters’ naive enthusiasm.  To start Fantastic Four, the brilliant team works together to design and build an interdimensional teleporter.  There’s joy in these scenes, a sense of bonding, and even if this section does drags on too long and is hampered by poor dialogue, it’s still the section where the cast and the film shines the brightest.  Eventually, the group actually gets to the other planet, and that’s when the movie loses what little it had going for it.  It succumbs to Franklin Storm’s (Reg E. Cathy) moralistic grandstanding, and any sense of character, fun, or even narrative purpose is lost.  In fact, Cathy is so shrill in his terribly written speeches that his eventual fate made me cheer instead of sniffle, and that level of unintentional hatred is glaring evidence of just how bad this movie becomes.

            But hey, it’s a superhero movie, so at least there will be dizzying CGI action that sustains its clunky plot, right?  No, Trank doesn’t even give us that.  There’s only one small, poorly conceived, flabergastingly simple ‘battle’ in Fantastic Four, the failure of which seems to stem from Trank being unable to grasp the character’s new, superhuman powers.  Granted, several of the powers in this group are quite silly (one’s stretchy and another is literally a rock), but not only does Trank fail to come up with an interesting way to use these powers in a battle, he doesn’t even come up with a way to shoot them so that they look cool.  The Human Torch and Invisible Woman become distorted when they use their powers, losing all sense of facial and bodily expression.  They are reduced to blobs moving around onscreen, which Trank failed to realize and hence tried to sell a dramatic moment between Invisible Woman and Dr. Doom (whose stiff design is equally hampering) that ends up as one of the most emotionally inert moments on film in 2015.  As for everyone else, stretchy Mr. Fantastic just looks silly, and The Thing is never more than a side thought in the entire film.  Getting the superheroes right is key to any superhero flick, making Fantastic Four’s belly flop in this area one of its most glaring failures.

            All this being said, Fantastic Four isn’t quite as bad as everyone is saying it is.  It’s certainly not good, but its plot is coherent and the actors occasionally find some fun in the script.  My suggestion?  Keep the actors, but get a team that will make the script and visuals match their abilities.  Maybe then we’ll get a good Fantastic Four movie.

Other Notes (Ridiculous Superhero Version):

Ø  Why did Invisible Woman struggle so much with her powers while at the facility but seem to have incredible control once they started fighting?

Ø  Why did Dr. Doom run away from the world in the first place?  Is he just a jerk?

Ø  Where did the cloth for Dr. Doom’s hood thing come from?

Ø  Why is The Thing so powerful?  Rocks aren’t actually indestructible.

Other Notes (Regular Version):

Ø  Why did the boys not invite Sue when they went to the other dimension?  She helped build the teleporter too!

Ø  Like all good scientists, they immediately touched the thing they’ve never seen before.

Ø  Funny that this movie was made so that a company (Fox) could keep the rights to Fantastic Four when the movie rails against corporate meddling.

Ø  Boy was that ending line (or lack of line) gratingly obvious.

Transcendence (2014)

5 of 10

Personal Bias Alert:  Likes sci-fi, likes the previous work of nearly everyone involved in this film

            “Transcendence” is the kind of film that makes people like me drool with anticipation.  It’s a big budget sci-fi story that seems rife with social commentary.  That it is the directorial debut of Wally Pfister, longtime cinematographer for Christopher Nolan, hardly scratches the surface of the impressive cast and crew.  Starring Johnny Depp, Rebecca Hall, Paul Bettany, and a cavalcade of Nolan actors, you know performances won’t be an issue.  It’s edited by David Rosenbloom, who among many things did last years “Out of the Furnace.”  The music is by Mychael Danna, whose catalog includes “Life of Pi,” “(500) Days of Summer,” and “Little Miss Sunshine.”  If for some reason you’re worried about the cinematography, rest assured that they got Jess Hall to back up Pfister, whose credits include “The Spectacular Now” and “Hot Fuzz.”  I could keep going, but you get the point.  This movie is stacked, and I was pumped to see it until I thought about its release date.  Putting it out in mid-April and free from comparable competition felt like a vote of no-confidence from the studio, and after seeing this underwhelming film, I have to agree with their choice.

            “Transcendence” follows married couple Will and Evelyn Caster (Depp and Hall), artificial intelligence researchers whose lives are thrown off course after Will is shot and killed by an extremist group.  Evelyn, along with fellow researcher Max Waters (Bettany), manage to upload Will’s mind into their AI computers, allowing his consciousness to live on through the computer.  Max has reservations, wondering if what they are making will actually be Will or an approximation of him.  As computer-Will becomes more and more powerful, the ramifications of Max’s question threatens to influence all of humanity’s future.

            The script, written by newcomer Jack Paglen, was strong enough to make the 2012 Black List.  For those unfamiliar with the Black List, it is the product of a survey of film executives who select their favorite unproduced screenplays.  While not a sure-fire barometer, inclusion on the Black List normally indicates a certain level of quality.  I’m not sure if this is one of the anomalies or if the screenplay got altered during production, but the story that made it on the screen doesn’t deserve any accolades.  The story is derivative, the characters are flat, and the ending is a messy failure.  It plods through its two hour runtime with no sense of pacing, making the whole thing seem closer to three hours than two.

            Pfister’s directorial inexperience doesn’t help matters, allowing these shortcomings to fester without correction.  It’s clear that he is most comfortable directing the camera; the whole thing really is beautiful to look at.  The shot composition and lighting, even when there is a lot of CGI stuff on the screen, is top notch.  What emotion there is in this film often comes from these flourishes, but this excellence accentuates how average the rest of the film is.  I can’t help but think that Pfister lacked a clear vision of what he wanted from the plot and from his actors.  The cast and crew is talented enough to produce something better than what the screenplay gives them, but even the most talented teams need someone to push them.  Pfister, it seems, failed to do so.

            Many reviewers are coming down hard on “Transcendence,” but I don’t think it deserves as much ire as it’s getting.  I was never bored by it, and between the performances and the visuals, there was just enough things going right to make it a mediocre but forgettable film.  Its fallen victim to its own hype, and few things skew reviews more than disappointment.

            Other Notes:

Ø  SPOILER ALERT:  I really didn’t understand the ending.  Why would killing the computer program kill Will and Evelyn’s physical bodies?  If it killed them, shouldn’t it kill all the people computer-Will modified?

Ø  I got really distracted by the actor who played the first guy that computer-Will modified.  I thought he looked a lot like Depp, but I also recognized him from “Capote.”  I don’t know why that distracted me, but it did.

Ø  Evelyn checked into the hotel under the name Turing.  I’m assuming that a reference to Alan Turing, the forefather of modern computer science.

Ø  In the last scene, Will and Evelyn are wearing shirts with banded collars, just like the characters in “Her” wore.  Coincidence?