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.

127 Hours

Rock 'n' Roll

Grade: B +

Director: Danny Boyle

Starring: James Franco, Amber Tamblyn, Kate Mara, and Clémence Poésy

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 1 hour, 93 minutes

The Book of Job is the most vexing story in the Bible. In order to test his faith, God permits the righteous Job to suffer at the hands of Satan: Job loses his possessions, endures physical harm, and his offspring are killed. Even worse is that entire exercise stems from a wager between God and Satan over whether the pious Job would succumb and curse God under the pressure of such loss.

In “127 Hours,” director Danny Boyle (Slumdog Millionaire) tells the harrowing, heroic tale of Aron Ralston (James Franco), a mountain climber who, in 2003, fell into a chasm while canyoneering through Robbers Roost in Utah and remained trapped for over five days after his right arm became literally caught between a rock and a hard place.

Aided by the pulsating score of his Slumdog composer, A.R. Rahman, and a light camera that enables tracking shots in tight places, Boyle splendidly and intimately dramatizes Ralston’s incredible efforts at survival and escape over the titular timeframe. Beyond trying to stave off dehydration and the elements, his biggest battle becomes the one with his own psyche. Water-colored memories of family and the rollercoaster relationship with his ex-girlfriend Rana (Clémence Poésy) soon transition into delusions of escape, a party with two hikers (Kate Mara and Amber Tamblyn) he met earlier in the day, and, in the film’s unquestioned highlight, a radio interview he conducts with himself over the stupidity of not telling anyone where he was planning to hike that day.

Throughout the film, Boyle places the viewer in proximity to Ralston’s viewpoint, whether he is diving into underground aquifers or drinking his own urine. Meanwhile, Franco, in an awards-worthy performance, shows Ralston progress through the five stages of grief. Thus, by the time a vision of his unborn son propels Ralston to finally seek a grisly escape, the once unthinkable seems almost inevitable in both his mind and that of the audience. While some may be unprepared for the visceral “money scene” – Boyle uses makeup and sounds effects to make viewers feel every hack through bone and sinew – its explicitness is essential to the film’s impact.

127 Hours succeeds in telling the story of a man who comes to grips with his own fallibility and vulnerability. When Ralston futilely screams for help after first being trapped in his rocky dungeon, Boyle slowly pans the camera out to show the sheer expanse of desolate earth surrounding him. Later, after Ralston climactically climbs out of his would-be catacomb, the heavens part and the music swells as he exclaims “I need help!” to three by-passers.

Matters become thornier, however, when Boyle expands the saga into a moral of redemption and salvation. Ralston is couched as a flawed man, but as best I can tell, he’s a wiseacre who doesn’t return his mother’s phone calls as often as he should and was negligent in his breakup with Rana. Otherwise, he appears to be a disarming, devil-may-care thrill-seeker who cares about his family and friends. Like Job, there’s a disconnect between the Ralston’s personal “transgressions” and the consequent tribulations heaped upon him, one that Boyle does not seem to adequately bridge.

However, the exegesis of the Book of Job is not necessarily righteousness and mercy, but rather the brutal lesson of man’s helplessness in the face of nature’s whims, whether inflicted at random or at the behest of a supreme being. The finale to Boyle’s film is joyful and life-affirming. But, like Into the Wild and Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man, 127 Hours is ultimately the story of a prideful man who fancies nature but misapprehends his place in it.

Neil Morris

*Originally published at http://www.indyweek.com/indyweek/james-franco-is-out-on-a-limb-in-127-hours/Content?oid=1846799