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.

Dumb and Dumber To

Oh, I get it. You're "birdbrained." [crickets]

Grade: C –

Director: Bobby and Peter Farrelly

Starring: Jim Carrey, Jeff Daniels, Rob Riggle, Laurie Holden, Rachel Melvin and Kathleen Turner

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 1 hr. 53 min.

During Dumb and Dumber To, lunkheaded Lloyd (Jim Carrey) is tricked into reaching below an elder nursing home patient’s bedding, searching for some supposedly missing diamonds. When Grannie’s contented grin prompts Lloyd that his groping has extended into the holiest of holies, he jerks away and, for the punch line, blows a dust cloud off his hand.

The scene is a fitting metaphor for a script seemingly extracted from a similarly musty void. Released 20 years ago, Dumb and Dumber was the first feature film for writer-directors Bobby and Peter Farrelly. That led off a triumvirate of irreverent comedies—Kingpin and There’s Something About Mary—over a four-year period that ensconced the Farrelly brothers as leaders of a new breed of cutting-edge comedy filmmakers.

But there are only so many grangina gags and yucks targeting minorities and the mentally challenged. Once that well dried up, it ushered in a 16-year creative drought for the Farrellys. And unfortunately, Dumb and Dumber To feels more like a neutered homage than a revival. [To the brothers’ partial credit, they played no part in the hideous knockoff prequel, Dumb and Dumber: When Harry Met Lloyd.]

After Lloyd emerges from an elaborate hoax where he faked being in a catatonic state for 20 years—another unintentional metaphor—he and manic doof pal Harry Dunne (Jeff Daniels) leave Rhode Island and embark on another road adventure, this time to track down Harry’s previously unknown daughter Penny (Rachel Melvin). Harry needs a kidney replacement, and he hopes Penny might be a “genital donor match.” Meanwhile, Lloyd’s motivation are his daydreams of wooing the fetching but equally dimwitted Penny.

Along the way, Lloyd and Harry become embroiled in a plot by Adele Pinchelow (Laurie Holden), Penny’s adopted mother, and her groundskeeper Travis (Rob Riggle) to kill Adele’s husband (Steve Tom), a famous scientist. There’s also a MacGuffin, a box containing a billion-dollar solution to the problems plaguing humankind that Dr. Pinchelow gives to Lloyd and Harry to deliver to Penny in El Paso, Texas.

There’s the expected surefit of flatulence and scatalogy, but it’s as stale as Carrey and Daniels’ man-child schtick, now creepily embodied in two fiftysomething actors. At least there’s an ease and familiarity to Carrey’s wit and physical comedy, which occasionally borders on inspired. On the other hand, Daniels can reel off the malaprops but appears uncomfortable, even embarrassed revisiting Harry’s arrested development.

Riggle ends up playing two roles, and he’s forgettable in both. Meanwhile, the actress formerly resembling Kathleen Turner is Fraida Felcher (make it stop…), the aging town floozy and Penny’s biological mom. And as if the audience wasn’t already quiet enough, a cameo by Mama June of Honey Boo Boo infamy adds a dollop of awkwardness.

At one point in Dumb and Dumber To there’s also a train wreck, perhaps the most appropriate metaphor of all.