The Martian

AAA is soooo slow

Grade: A

Director: Ridley Scott

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

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 2 hr. 21 min.

Combining heart and mind, The Martian is an ultra-modern technical achievement wrangled into a throwback cinematic experience. There’s the grand backdrop of space operas like 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Right Stuff, but in service to jarringly accessible narrative and characters. It’s Matt Damon’s best film in at least five years, maybe more. It’s director Ridley Scott’s best film in 15 years, maybe 33.

During the scurry to abort a manned mission to Mars in the midst of a fierce storm, astronaut Mark Watney (Matt Damon) is clobbered by flying debris and disappears in the abyss. Presuming Watney dead, his commander (Jessica Chastain) and the rest of the Ares 3 crewmates leave him behind and embark on the long voyage home. When Watney awakes, begins the arduous task to contact Earth while subsisting on the hostile red planet.

Watney, a botanist with an exponential (and perhaps unrealistic) level of technical acumen, fashions part of his climate-controlled dwelling pod into a greenhouse, creating water through alchemy and growing potatoes in a compost of Martian dirt and discarded feces. It goes swimmingly for a while, but the technological safety blanket is always bound to go awry, suddenly and spectacularly.

The film has three fronts. Watney’s Martian homestead, the Hermes spaceship carrying his crew back to Earth (its exquisite, zero-G interiors evocative of Kubrick) and NASA’s best and brightest furiously conceiving ways to rescue Watney and keep him alive in the meantime. There are no silly stereotypes, no ill-conceived character conflicts. Ted Sanders (Jeff Daniels) is the starched-shirt head of NASA who funnels success through bureaucratic constraints. Vincent Capoor (Chiwetel Ejiofor, so good), head of the Mars Mission project, breathes a bit more fiery idealism. Kristen Wiig provides just the right amount of comic relief as a PR flack

The most daunting obstacle in The Martian isn’t the inhospitable Martian landscape, but the clock counting up the number of days Watney remains marooned, and for the Hermes to reach Earth, and for NASA to merely ready a resupply rocket. This isn’t some garish Michael Bay action flick hardwired into our era of instant gratification. Scott’s 141-minute running time allows the storyline to unspool logically, furthering the tedium of time, space and progress.

As the plot crystallizes into an amalgam of Cast Away and Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, the disco music accompanying Watney’s isolation is more than a kitschy device. It’s the soundtrack of an era replete with ingenuity and can-do human spirit. The Martian doesn’t shove these ideals—or its emotions—in your face, but rather permits them to permeate your synapses. It’s a celebration of science and intelligent problem-solving. And it’s also an epic whose climax combines the visual grandeur of Gravity with the thrills of an Avengers movie.

The Martian is a paean to humankind’s capacity for advancement, exploration and, yes, moviemaking.

12 Years a Slave

That's Master John Harrison to you, Platt

Grade: A

Director: Steve McQueen

Starring: Chiwetel Ejiofor, Benedict Cumberbatch, Michael Fassbender, Lupita Nyong'o, Sarah Paulson, Paul Giamatti and Brad Pitt

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 2 hr. 13 min.

12 Years a Slave is going to win the Oscar for Best Picture. Chiwetel Ejiofor is going to win an Oscar for Best Actor. Steve McQueen is probably going to win Best Director. And, Michael Fassbender is going to at least be nominated for Best Supporting Actor. Given Hollywood’s roller coaster history with race, whether those declaratives strike you as meritorious recognition for an extraordinary movie, or a reflexive reaction generated by political correctness and white guilt, is a rather legitimate debate. Except for one select group of people: those who have actually seen the film. For them, the mere bestowing of trophies and trinkets pales in comparison to a motion picture whose story, emotion and, yes, beauty transcends such meager plaudits.

McQueen’s adaptation of Solomon Northup’s eponymous 1853 autobiography is at once both straightforward and layered, unsightly and gorgeous, disheartening and uplifting. It renders the “peculiar institution” of American slavery like few (if any) previous films, particularly as a (perhaps intentional) counterpoint to the ahistorical antics of Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained. Moreover, it augments the obvious horrors of lynchings and the lash with a sobering portrait of the degradation and suffocating desolation that flows out of a financial system built around human enslavement.

Based on a harrowing true story, Solomon, a free black man living in Saratoga Spring, N.Y. in 1841 with his wife and two young children, is lured to Washington, D.C under the pretense of a lucrative gig playing the violin. There, Solomon is drugged, chained, beaten, renamed “Platt,”and shipped south to Louisiana, where the Spanish moss hangs like tears from the very trees used to hang runaways. What follows is a dozen anni of bondage as Solomon works the cane and cotton fields for several masters, some more cruel than others but all complicit.

The film presents immorality both seen and unseen. On one end of the spectrum is Solomon whipping Patsey (Lupita Nyong’o), a slave mistress, at the armed direction of their drunken, mad master Edwin Epps (Michael Fassbender, repellant and mesmerizing), a scene of minutes that seems like hours, the brutality building to the crescendo of seeing the lash ripping open Patsey’s flesh.

However, equally disconcerting are the evils McQueen leaves to the viewer’s imagination. A slave marketer (Paul Giamatti), declaring that his sentimentality extends no further than the coin, sells children away from their slave mother, boasting that her young mulatto daughter will fetch a pretty penny from certain unsavory buyers. In a single scene, McQueen ticks off several atrocities: rape by slave owners; the dissolution of slave families; and even child sex trafficking.

While the overt cruelty is striking, what sets 12 Years a Slave apart is the deliberate way it immerses the viewer into the oppressive, emotionally numb reality of people stripped of their freedoms, forced to abandon hope in order to survive. Slaves dare not utter their real names or reveal their literacy. In other instances, slaves go about their daily chores as one of their own dangles from a tree branch, or they are awoken in the middle of the night to perform a kind of minstrel show for their master.

Indeed, the film’s true brilliance rests in how it immerses the audience in the hopelessness. You quietly reprove each time Solomon casts an eye toward running into the forest, asks someone to deliver a letter up north to his family or considers revealing his true identity to a stranger, fearful of the retribution that would befall him. Viewers find themselves siding with villains, like the overseer who saves Solomon’s life after he fights a malicious white carpenter (Paul Dano) and “only” punishes him by letting him hang from a noose all day, Solomon’s muddy tiptoes the only thing sparing him from suffocation. And, you gradually share Solomon’s affinity for William Ford (Benedict Cumberbatch, typically nuanced), a plantation owner and Baptist preacher (the way biblical scripture was twisted into a justification for slave-owning recurs on several occasions) whose relative kindness masks the obvious fact that he still buys and enslaves other humans like chattel.

In fact, one of the most memorable moments is when mistress Harriet Shaw (Alfre Woodard in a tremendous cameo), practiced in antebellum manners, in one breath recounts both the indignities she’s partaken in order to survive and the eternal damnation awaiting the captor she favors.

At the center of the moral malstrom is Ejiofor, a respected character actor whose astounding performance is both brave and humanizing. Aided by Ejiofor’s valiant interpretation, Solomon is the apt vehicle for conveying these awful truths. The plight of Africans rounded up and shipped from their homeland into servitude is a world far removed from contemporary Western audiences. On the other hand, the freedom Solomon loses is our own, a life of American domestic tranquility that’s stripped away and replaced by a Kafkaesque nightmare. Solomon Northup is the soul of a setting in which there’s precious little to be found.

Salt

Say hello to my anorexic friend

Grade: B

Director: Phillip Noyce

Starring: Angelina Jolie, Liev Schreiber, and Chiwetel Ejiofor

Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 1 hour, 33 minutes

Angelina Jolie isn’t as good as actress as her notoriety portends nor is she as bad as her detractors claim. But, she has always struck a convincing action (anti-)heroine, no small feat in an almost exclusively male-dominated genre.

Such is the case in Salt, in which Jolie plays the titular CIA officer (to wit, a part originally written for Tom Cruise), who goes on the lam after being accused of being a KGB sleeper agent plotting to assassinate the Russian president, et al. The film opens ten years prior, with a scantily-clad Salt being tortured by North Korean captors before being part of a prisoner exchange across the Bridge of No Return. This reprise of the opening sequence in Die Another Day is not the only James Bond homage seasoning Salt: a would-be Russian defector, Orlov (Daniel Olbrychski), employs Rosa Klebb’s shoe-dagger in From Russia with Love to effect his escape from custody; even echoes of The Living Daylights surround the circumstances behind the assassination of a high-ranking Russian dignitary.

These Cold War movie references are not the least bit profound, much like casting Liev Schreiber, who played Raymond Shaw in the The Manchurian Candidate remake, in another movie about commie agents nesting States-side awaiting their appointed hour to strike. Instead, they infuse the film with an almost nostalgic air, evoking bygone threats that now seem passé in comparison to the dangers of the new century. Indeed, only the recent roundup of a Russian sleeper cell living in New Jersey gives Salt a modicum of fortuitous topicality.

Untangling the web of plot twists and turns would require quintuple the allotted space for this review. Suffice to say the script requires you to not so much suspend your disbelief as put it in stasis. Don't mistake confusion for complexity in a storyline that vacillates in sync with Salt’s ever-changing hairstyle and coloring. Considering the involvement of screenwriter Kurt Wimmer, whose credits read like a rogues gallery of cinematic crime (Law Abiding Citizen; Street Kings; Ultraviolet; The Recruit; etc.), the fact that Salt isn’t an unwatchable dumpster fire should receive second billing on the theater marquee.

To the contrary, director Phillip Noyce maintains a brisk, breathless pace evocative of his ‘90s Jack Ryan pictures. The terrific non-CGI stunt work is as retro as the film’s premise. Moreover, the genuinely keeps-you-guessing storyline imbues Salt with a moral ambiguity that plays to Jolie’s personal and professional personae. A bit more character development and background would have put more flesh on Salt’s rail-thin motives. But, preserving an air of mystery – and the 93-minute running time – prove a worthy tradeoffs.

Like its namesake condiment, Salt lacks substance but goes perfectly with a movie-going popcorn-muncher. It is taut and pleasantly preposterous, which is as much as you can ask from pulp that only pretends to take itself serious so you don’t have to.

Neil Morris

2012

Ah-ha, I think I found your leak.

Grade: D +

Director: Roland Emmerich

Starring: John Cusack, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Amanda Peet, Thandie Newton, Oliver Platt, Thomas McCarthy, Woody Harrelson, and Danny Glover

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 2 hours, 38 minutes

In every Roland Emmerich disaster flick, there are always the digital money shots that not only sustain Emmerich’s inexplicable filmmaking career but seemingly redeem the poor audience members who plunk down their hard-earned scratch to witness tsunamis swamping Manhattan and aliens imploding the White House.

They also usually come about midway through any one of his excruciatingly long apocalyptic forays – Independence Day, Godzilla, The Day After Tomorrow – leaving the rest of the time wasted with the same character archetypes. There is the intrepid scientist who warns the noble U.S. President and some skeptical member of his staff about impeding doom, along with a third-party hero who just wants to save his family and the world, in that order. And, always along for the ride are barely realized secondary players who supply annoying comic relief and/or cannon fodder for all the CGI cataclysms.

So it is in 2012, Emmerich’s latest act of paranoia profiteering. Scientific advisor Adrian Helmsley (Chiwetel Ejiofor, mortgaging his talent for a paycheck) discovers three years out that on December 21, 2012, the occasion of the end of the Mayan Long Count Calendar, the moon and stars will align for the first time since the demise of the dinosaurs, igniting solar flares and flinging neutrinos into Earth’s core that will heat and melt the mantle, causing massive tectonic shifts and, more importantly, lots and lots of F/X earthquakes.

World leaders, including President Thomas Wilson (Danny Glover, slurring his lines like a punch-drunk pugilist), are forewarned, but the cursory, slipshod preparation montages are merely an appetizer for the calamitous main course. Chasms open, buildings crumble, tidal waves crash down, and volcanoes erupt. Our principal tour guide through the Book of Revelations is middling author Jackson Curtis (John Cusack), whose chance encounter with another Emmerich archetype, the nut-job conspiracy theorist (played here with ease by Woody Harrelson), sends him on a mission to rescue his estranged wife Kate (Amanda Peet), her new boyfriend (Thomas McCarthy), and his kids from peril.

The disaster scenes are loopy, but they do constitute popcorn-chomping amusement to a point. Where this and every Emmerich cinematic shipwreck runs aground is its woeful attempts to interject character development, sentimentality, and morality into their narratives. Endless aerial escapes from danger are punctuated by unending tearful telephone goodbyes (yes, apparently satellite and cell phone technology will survive the End of Days as long as cockroaches). Scenes of a tsunami engulfing Washington, D.C. are juxtaposed against Curtis and his wife blithering about why their marriage hit the skids.

The rendezvous point for the lucky or lucrative few is a series of metallic arks anchored in the Himalayas that will house man and beast until the flood waters recede, a comical incarnation of Strangelove’s mine-shafts. When Helmsley and comely First Daughter Laura Wilson (Thandie Newton) protest the fate of those who slaved to construct the mammoth boats, a grouchy bureaucrat (Oliver Platt) sarcastically invites them to give their boarding passes to a couple of poor Chinese workers. The moment is cloying enough. What’s unintentionally hilarious is Helmsley and Wilson’s reaction: They shrug their shoulders and climb aboard their ship, summarily leaving the peasants and Emmerich’s principled pretense to a watery grave.

Emmerich doesn’t just pander to tableaux of death and destruction; he relishes in them. Indulging in new levels of rank nihilism, the director conspicuously razes St. Peter’s Basilica upon the heads of the Papacy and thousands of praying parishioners. This is the second or third time he has demolished the White House, this time using a tidal wave carrying the USS John F. Kennedy (the motive behind Emmerich’s choice of ship is peculiar considering the actual “Big John” is decommissioned and berthed outside Philadelphia).

Ultimately, Emmerich rationalizes the end of the world and the deaths of millions as an excuse for Helmsley and Wilson to hook-up and a way to get Kate’s boyfriend out of the picture so Curtis and his family can reunite. Lovely. If the apocalypse ever actually arrives, let’s hope every copy of 2012 is among its first casualties.

Neil Morris