Review: The Martian

The Martian (3D / thematic spoilers)
Cert: 12A / 141 mins / Dir. Ridley Scott / Trailer



Seriously Hollywood, can you just stop putting Sean Bean in films? You're only encouraging him. Now, The Martian represents great value for money to your average cinema-goer as a) It's almost two and a half-hours long, and b) It's pretty much two films rolled into one. There's the survival-thriller about an unintentionally abandoned explorer, left to fend for himself in a hostile environment which will kill him without a second thought, and then there's the heart-wrenching, rescue-mission, adventure, in which morality and plucky idealism come head to head with practical limitations and financial bureaucracy. I'll leave it up to you to guess which of these wins the battle for screentime…

Credit where it's deservedly due, The Martian is a visually gorgeous film, and to make a pleasant change, the 3D only makes the dusty, ochre landscapes of our celestial neighbour look even more welcoming*¹. It just goes to show that 3D can be used well in live-action; it's just usually not. The settings of a desolate planet and semi-claustrophobic space vessel also allow Ridley Scott to retread some of the steps he took in Alien, although as cinematographer Dariusz Wolski was also Scott's DoP on Prometheus, you get the impression that it was an intentional group-decision rather than a subconscious one.

The film itself? Well, as I've intimated, I found it more of a mixed bag. Matt Damon is pretty great and carries the role in a stoically self-deprecating way. The crew of his (ex-)ship, The Hermes, give everything they can, given their limited screentime. Jessica Chastain gets to do most of the lifting (and does it well, as always), but Kate Mara, Sebastian Stan, Michael Peña and Askel Hennie are little more than pencilled in, with the focus falling more on the Earth-bound NASA team charged with formulating an efficient exit-strategy for their stranded astronaut.

And the only real problem I had with the film is that far too much of its time is spent on Earth watching Chiwetel Ejiofor and Jeff Daniels bicker about public relations, while Kristen Wiig and Mackenzie Davis pull concerned faces, and Donald Glover gets to be the clichéd, unconventional, "I've got a crazy idea… but it just might work!" guy who finally unveils a plan which should have been the first thing they thought of.

Short version: Anything which takes place on Mars or in space is awesome. Anything which takes place on Earth is an embarrassing mess full of mis-cast roles and hackneyed dialogue. The more the second one comes into play, the more loudly the wheels of the screenplay squeak. And to be fair, this could be the exact state of affairs in the book, but I wouldn't know as I haven't read it yet*².

Vaguely spoilery question, highlight-to-read: Speaking of the book, can anyone who's read it tell me if Mark's burning of Martinez's crucifix in order to release the energy required to create life-giving water is covered in any more depth? Obviously the context is given fully in the film, but I thought this might have raised a question on the comfort of religion versus the facts of science, similar to Elixabeth Shaw's quandary in Prometheus. Then it's just never mentioned again.

Back on Mars, there's also the question of gravity. Occasionally, the exterior shots have been filmed in a higher frame-rate and then slowed down to standard to simulate the lower gravity (slower-falling objects, dus-plumes etc). But only very occasionally. The rest of the time, Mark's just padding around (indoors and out) as if the g-ratio is the same as Earth's. When it's not. Which is odd in itself, because quite a lot of work's gone into the zero-g effects onboard the The Hermes. As much as the film loves talking about science, it has a real problem showing it.

Astronaut Watney's mental health is also an issue which seems to be deftly avoided by the film. While his semi-emaciated form appears after months of surviving on dwindling rations, the extent of his inevitable breakdown is characterised only be him referring to himself as A Space Pirate, in a typically glib manner. I know I made pretty much the opposite point for Sandra Bullock's unstable character in Gravity, but in order for Watney to be so rational and upbeat after 300+ days alone on a world which is trying to kill him, he'd have to be unhinged to begin with. Obviously the mental strength and agility of potential astronauts is tested and measured before they get anywhere near a spacecraft, but we learn nothing of Watney's life on Earth, other than the fact that he has parents (…). No bar is set by which the audience can measure his stability, it's all just taken as read that he doesn't turn into a psychopath after a month without human contact.

Ultimately, Ridley Scott seems fascinated by the mechanics of survival on a hostile planet, but less interested in the isolation and insanity which would go hand-in-hand with it.

Watch The Martian for the visuals, and leave the existentialism to Interstellar…

Oh, and as if they would live-broadcast the rescue-mission on TV so that the world could potentially either hear the astronauts dying, or get really annoyed when NASA cut off the audio-feed of the astronauts dying…



For the spectacle, yes.



You're probably not going to watch it more than a couple of times, so a rental.



Matt Damon comes out of this very well, as do the crew of The Hermes.
Everyone on Earth, though..?



In terms of story, I couldn't tell you.
In terms of tension, sometimes.
In terms of visuals, yes.



Nope.



There isn't.



So let me get this straight: You can include a direct Lord Of The Rings reference in the screenplay (in one of Sean Bean's scenes, no less), and an Iron Man reference elsewhere, but no love for the GFFA..?

Okay, The Martian stars Jeff Daniels as the largely unconvincing Head Of NASA™, but in 1981, Jeff appeared in a movie called Ragtime, which also featured the late, great Bruce Boa; better known to audiences either as The Waldorf Salad Guy from Fawlty Towers, or General Rieekan in The Empire Strikes Back.





Shorter version: The Martian is basically a longer and more measured take on this…






*¹ Seriously, we've got a pretty good idea of it now, and if that is what Mars looks like, I want to go. Granted, I want to go largely because it looks so much like Tatooine, but even so. Anyway, I'll be the guy standing atop the rock formations, making barking noises and waving a gaderffii stick…

*² No really, I've barely got time to read all the 'Journey To The Force Awakens' material which is coming out before December 17th. I certainly don't have time to read standalone novels when I can just watch a movie of it in two and a half hours...

DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.

Review: Pixels

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Pixels (2015 film)

Pixels is a 2015 American comedy film ^{[citation needed]} produced by Columbia Picures and Happy Madison Productions, based on a 1982 video game in which the players control Adam Sandler and Kevin James, urinating over the smouldering ashes of a generation's charred memories of adolescent fun.

The film is directed ^{[citation needed]} by Chris Columbus, rated 12A in the UK, runs for 106 excruciating minutes and holds an overall score of 18% on review-aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes.
It is a longer, much more painful version of its trailer.

. Contents
. 1 Plot
. 2 Cast
. 3 Scripting
. 4 Effects
. 5 Critical Response
. 6 Summary

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Plot
A sort of shoddily re-hashed Ghostbusters, filtered through Wreck-It Ralph, but with the wit, warmth or inventiveness of neither. After NASA send a video-cassette of gameplay footage into the solar system in 1982, a race of aliens misunderstands the… y'know, what? Fuck it. That's already more effort than the film makes to explain itself.

Evil pixel-y things fall from sky!
Adam Sandler must save world whilst hitting on MILF!
That's about it.
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Cast
• Adam Sandler as a charmless, underachieving man-child in a dead-end 'cable guy' job who's chosen to save the world because he's special, see? (and is friends with the US President) Like all the best ^{[citation needed]} Adam Sandler characters, he doesn't have to change one single iota throughout the entire screenplay, as acceptance by his superiors, the admiration of his peers and the awe of humanity's enemies is all handed directly to him in return for no effort. Most importantly, for a champion video-game player, Sandler himself is never seen actually playing any video games. Not once.

• Kevin James as Adam Sandler's best friend who has inexplicably (ie, it's not explained) been elected US President. At first I thought this could be a subtle play on Bill Gates' 'be nice to geeks' quip, but since his character is demonstrably thick as pigshit and every bit as charming, it hardly underlines the point.

• Josh Gad, who's mostly there because Adam and Kevin are. He plays a geek and conspiracy theorist who is a closeted gay when it suits the script for cheap laughs, but is mostly enamoured by a fictional female game character (Ashley Benson) whose incarnation as an actress is markedly less lifelike than her 8-bit pixelated form.

• Michelle Monaghan as Lieutenant Colonel Van Patten of the US Military who is also a single-mother, but who is still reduced to being The Girl One™ on account of this being an Adam Sandler film.

• Peter Dinklage struts around the film as a cocky, self-absorbed video-game champion with no redeemable qualities until the third-act reveal that he cheated in the Finals, after which he struts around as a cocky, slightly contrite video-game ex-chamption with no redeemable qualities. Dinklage can do comedy, he just doesn't do it here.

• Brian Cox as another X-Men alumnus mistakenly believing that Pixels would be a good way to show that old guys can have fun, too! Plays a constantly angry Army-major stereotype who's so crudely pencilled into the script he's more of a monotype.

• Sean Bean as a Professional Yorkshireman, again, whose role as a British Army major is to unconvincingly yet unquestioningly spout a script full of Americanisms.
The entertainment industry's search for Bean's self-awareness continues.
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Scripting
Sandler clumsily ad-libs his way around a script which took longer to read back than it did to write, whilst the other performers recite their lines with a a combination of disbelief and world-weary acceptance.
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Effects
All things considered, the CGI interpretations of 1980s video-game classics are relatively good. Still not outstanding, but certainly more accomplished than anything else in the film. The 3D presentation is thoroughly under-used, given the film's penchant for having digital creatures flying around the screen at frequent intervals.
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Critical Response
Movie-blog World Of Blackout scored the film 1 out of 7, the site's lowest rating, stating "Pixels is a towering monument to lazy and inept screenwriting and performance; the living embodiment of everything that's wrong with focus-grouped, Hot Topic nostalgia. It's the Hollywood studio-system's equivalent of Peter Kay asking you if you remember Pac-Man for two hours, by the end of which you'll wish you didn't."
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Summary

The film Pixels comprises of an attack on Earth by extra-terrestrials who learned about human civilisation from a VHS cassette launched into space in 1982. The film doesn't go so far as explaining why the alien forces then go on to make references to both Paperboy and Max Headroom, both of which were developed in 1984.

If a film about popular culture can't even get its own references right, why should an audience bother?

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DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.

Review: Jupiter Ascending

Jupiter Ascending (3D)
Cert: 12A / 127 mins / Dir. Andy Wachowski & Lana Wachowski / Trailer



Oh, it's all very well saying that Jupiter Ascending is "from the creators of The Matrix trilogy". So, if you remember, was two thirds of The Matrix trilogy*¹.

So February knocks on the door of 2015's party bearing the gift of a galaxy-spanning sci-fi film written and directed by the Wachowskis, and it's a pretty piss-poor fairytale where The Princess is also The Adventurer, and still needs rescuing every twenty minutes. Mila Kunis looks bored, Channin Tatum looks confused, Eddie Redmayne looks embarrassed and Sean Bean looks thoroughly unrepentant at turning up and playing himself. Again.

It's not that the film is forgivable 'dumb-and-fun', but more that it's two hours of incoherent and unwanted exposition joined together by things exploding. Jupiter Ascending is trying so hard to establish an ongoing, pan-galactic mythos that it's forgotten it needs to be a good movie first.

The ethos of style-over-substance is undoubtable (unsurprising, even), but that style is patchworked together more from the very worst sci-fi/fantasy movies you've seen, and less from the best. It's like some horrible, horrible Comic Relief crossover between The Matrix, John Carter and Cinderella. The Wachowskis also have the fucking audacity to riff on Terminator and Back To The Future, too.

No matter how impressive the visuals get (they're very Shiny™ and far too busy, but well implemented), you can't shake the feeling that you're being told a story by someone who only watched their first sci-fi film the day before, and felt obliged to have a crack at it themselves. Because you know you're in trouble when Channing Tatum's been awarded the mantle of delivering bursts of exposition every half an hour (ably assisted by Sean Bean of course, who's always on hand to make a bad thing worse. "What? Oh, don't worry about the accent Sean. Hmm? No, we're not going to ADR it, but the rest of the film makes so little sense that your Yorkshire-Space-Warrior won't even be on the audience's list. They'll be far too busy raising their eyebrows at people with bits of tin-foil stuck on their faces, that we're saying are The Aliens, trust me.")

Even the out-of-the-blue script reference to 27b/6 lands with the grace and subtelty of a Wilhelm Scream in an empty room (there is no Wilhelm Scream, btw).

I suspect that the film's coda, mirroring its opening act, is indicative of the central theme about acceptance of the cyclical futility of endeavour. Although I also think this because Jupiter Ascending brings us the very worst performance from Eddie Redmayne (channeling his best Lord Voldemort) a mere month after his best, like a sort of Alpha and Omega of cinematic acting.

A sci-fi actioner so indelibly stupid that it makes Highlander 2 look like Looper, re-inventing The Matrix never seemed so desperate...

The worst part? A group of marauding alien assassins in single-pilot attack vehicles chased a man in hover-boots through the sky, blowing up a Chicago skyscraper in the process, and I was bored. Bored.

Is it bollocks.



Rent it if you must, but you'll begrudge spending the money.



Not for the actors, not for the directors, not for the composer. I'm sure there was a tea-boy on the crew who probably peaked here, though.



Not even close.



I will. I BLOODY WILL.



Not that I heard (although with the in-auditorium volume set to BASTARD-LOUD, I could well have missed one).



Jupiter Ascending has an appearance from Terry Gilliam, who of course wrote and directed Time Bandits featuring everyone's favourite Astromech droid, Kenny Baker.



The film's visuals and Michael Giacchino's score save it from bottom marks, but only by a CGI'd hair's breadth.




*¹ That was a cheap joke, for which I apologise. I am one of around twelve people in the world who actually enjoys all three Matrix films. Still thought it was a joke worth saying, though ;)

DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.