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.

Jupiter Ascending

Black Swan Reloaded

Grade: D +

Directors: Andy and Lana Wachowski

Starring: Mila Kunis, Channing Tatum, Sean Bean, Eddie Redmayne, Douglas Booth and Tuppence Middleton

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 2 hr. 7 min.

Every time I heard the character name Jupiter Jones in Jupiter Ascending, all I thought about was the youth detective of the same name from “The Three Investigators” detective book series I used read as a teenager.

Don’t fret if that reference is too obscure for you. Directors Andy and Lana Wachowski are still dining out on The Matrix, and the filmmakers brazenly ape their seminal sci-fi thriller for their latest bit of sci-fi silliness. There’s a would-be chosen one—the aforementioned Jupiter (Mila Kunis)—plucked from obscurity to save the human race. There’s an acrobatic protector/love interest in Caine Wise (Channing Tatum), a space lycan who I’m convinced is cast with half-wolf, half-human DNA in order to reel in the Twilight crowd.

And of course the human race is being unwittingly farmed for nefarious purposes. In The Matrix, we’re organic batteries. In Jupiter Ascending, people are some really potent and lucrative Soylent-style Oil of Olay for the intergalactic jetset.

Jupiter’s randomly replicated genetic structure marks her as the reincarnated matriarch to the House of Abrasax and a possible heir to Earth. It also marks her as a threat to the three Abrasax brats: vain sister Kalique (Tuppence Middleton), playboy brother Titus (Douglas Booth) and fey eldest sibling Balem, played by Eddie Redmayne in a high-camp performance that’s the most mistimed Oscar-season turn since Paramount released Norbit after Eddie Murphy was nominated for Dreamgirls.

In essence, Jupiter finds herself thrust into an estate squabble over who gets to inherit land and the family business. She almost marries one “son,” while Kalique mysteriously disappears from the story altogether. But Jupiter mostly spends the entire film getting rescued from one jam after another by Caine, whose anti-gravity boots appear to be the real power in the universe.

The Wachowskis are never short on eye-candy, and they blow their entire budget on bloated 3D special effects. Some are eye-popping, but there’s an artificiality to the CGI that renders it the visual equivalent of background noise.

There’s a clever interlude when Jupiter and Caine are escorted through the interminable galactic bureaucracy in order to certify her royal bona fides. The steampunk set design of this sequence evokes the best of Terry Gilliam—indeed, Gilliam has a cameo as a grizzled record keeper.

Otherwise, Jupiter Ascending manages to meld facile, inane dialogue—”bees are genetically engineered to recognize royalty”—with a confusing, disjointed storyline. It’s like a Disney World amusement ride stretched over two hours. It’s MoonQuake Lake, the fake movie briefly seen during the recent Annie remake. It’s a 5-dollar DVD bin knockoff of Star Wars.

One would be inclined to recommend coupling joints with the 3D glasses distributed to moviegoers braving Jupiter Ascending. But an acquaintance with some expertise in such matters informs me that would only exaggerate the already overlong running time.

So, will somebody just pass me the blue pill?