The Martian

I liked The Martian so much, I hope it sparks a genre.

No, not near-future science fiction.  Not Mars.  Not even Survival.  I hope it sparks a genre called “Smart, capable people solving problems.”  Like Apollo 13, and even like All is Lost, it’d be a genre without villains and without gunfire (But ‘splosions are always ok.  What’s the point of a movie camera if you can’t point it at a ‘splosion?).  It’d just be people figuring out how to do stuff. In The Martian, near-future astronaut (and botanist) Matt Damon needs to figure out how to survive being marooned on Mars while NASA scientists need to figure out how to rescue him.  That’s more than enough drama for 144 minutes of film.

Why?  Because figuring out how to do stuff is absolutely fundamental to the human condition.  As such, drama about this process is both universal and captivating (if done right).

Hang on a minute: I’ve just described the “heist” movie.  Smart, capable, professional criminals solving problems are the bread and butter of heist movies.  Apollo 13, All is Lost, and The Martian are basically heist movies in which the characters are trying to figure out how to save a life instead of crack a safe.

Man, I love heist movies.

Ok, back to it.  Drew Goddard adapted The Martian’s screenplay from Andy Weir’s novel of the same name.  Goddard wrote and directed the superlative The Cabin in the Woods, another tightly plotted and thoroughly entertaining film.  In one his promotional interviews, director Ridley Scott said that Goddard’s Martian script was the best he’d seen since Alien, and I believe it.  I can’t wait to see what Goddard writes next.

As for the rest of the pieces of the puzzle, Christopher Orr says it best in this ‘Atlantic’ article.  The Martian is a tale of people who are good at their jobs doing their jobs well, and The Martian is a product of people who are good at their jobs doing their jobs well.  It’s a pleasure to behold.

Oh, on another note: Devin Faraci at birthmoviesdeath.com makes a great point about the inspirational power of this film.  No, not like those silly posters of people rowing crew that one finds on the walls of dispiriting cubicle farms.  The Martian is the kind of movie that inspires kids to grow up to work at JPL, or NASA, or the USDA.  Sure, it’s easy to make astronauts look cool, but your average kid has a better chance of growing up to play in the NBA than make it into the Space Program.  Show me a movie that makes science qua science, math qua math look cool, and you have a movie to which I am absolutely going to drag my kids.

Prometheus

I have mixed feelings about Prometheus.  I love its look, its feel, its ambition.  I appreciate its casting of serious, high-quality actors.  However, its screenplay needed a few more passes before it was ready to go into production.

Prometheus weds a big budget to a high concept.  Its sets are magnificent, its world dazzling.  I saw this film in 3-D, mostly because an old friend of mine was one of the camera techs, and the effects were more immersive than distracting.  Add the casting of proven performers like Charlize Theron, Idris Elba, Michael Fassbender, and Guy Pearce, and this looks and feels like elite work.  The concept, well, we’re talking about finding the origin of human life on Earth, and the film’s characters have the kind of existential questions director Ridley Scott tackled in his classic Blade Runner: “Where do we come from?  Why are we here?  Why can’t we have more time?”  While we have mixed feelings about the answers the film provides or withholds, we have to credit the production with going after them.

Prometheus gets so many things right that it’s a shame the picture can’t keep our suspension of disbelief alive.  As the audience in a science fiction movie, we walk in willing to believe in technologies that defy the known laws of physics.  We can’t, however, believe in people that don’t act like people or in organisms that can, say, grow without eating.

One of the great things about Ridley Scott’s Alien was that it took things a while to get going.  We go to know the crew of the Nostromo not by having them stand up and recite their bios, but just by following them around for a while.  Once we knew them, we cared about them and believed in their story.  Prometheus gives us an implausible roll call followed by a mission briefing PowerPoint set after the ship has reached its destination, and –bang- we’re into the action.  We in the audience are left thinking, “Really?  These people are just now meeting each other for the first time?  Did they not chat while they were loading their stuff aboard back on Earth?  Oh, and how is it possible that any scientist would sign up for a long, potentially career-derailing, mission without knowing what’s involved?”  So we’re left with thumbnail sketches:  there are Redshirt One, Redshirt Two, Redshirt Three, and Redshirt Four, plus the actors whom we recognize.  Once they’re on Planet Danger, they begin acting in ways that violate even what little we do know about them: the biologist who signed up for a space journey freaks out at the prospect of alien life, then actually tries to pet a scary space-snake.  The geologist runs away from someplace he finds terrifying, only to seek refuge in the exact same place for no real reason.  These examples come right off the top of my head, and the more I think the more I recall.  How can I believe in the plight of these people if I don’t believe they’re people?   (Note: Michael Fassbender’s android character is the most consistent and fully realized of the bunch.  It’s possible that the film’s saying the android is more human than the humans, but that’s the kind of thing you think of later.  While you’re watching the film, you’re thinking, “This doesn’t make sense.”  From there, it’s a short step to “I call BS.”)  And then there’s the funky biology: creatures in this universe appear to have the ability to metabolize thin air.  Humans in this universe can undergo massively invasive abdominal surgery, then run, climb, fight, and singlehandedly rappel fifty feet without tearing open the wound and bleeding out.  And the list goes on.

And that’s the thing about Prometheus.  Those big ideas?  They’re really cool.  That art direction?  That set, costume, and creature design?  Really really cool.  The performances?  The world-class cast acts the heck out of the material, and Michael Fassbender continues his steady march toward Can Do No Wrong status.

But the writing isn’t there.  The characters feel like characters, and the revelations provide more WTH moments than “Oh, wow!” moments.  Prometheus excels at all the “elite filmmaking” stuff, but it stumbles on the fundamentals.  This could have been a great, fascinating, entertaining and wonderful classic that melded the best of Alien and Blade Runner into a rousing, challenging, enriching whole.  Instead, it’s a beautiful failure.  I wanted to love Prometheus.  I was ready to love Prometheus.  I couldn’t love Prometheus.

Edward James Olmos Double Feature!

The Green Hornet is one of those movies in which the villain shoots his right-hand man for no good reason, only to have his second-tier henchmen drag the body away and charge into battle.  You've got to wonder how that works.  I mean, let's say you're a henchman.  You're talking to your headhunter and weighing competing offers from Hank Scorpio and the villain from this movie.  Scorpio offers a free dental plan and contributes to your 401(k).  This guy offers you a speedy climb up the ladder, followed by a quick and violent death if you happen to catch him on a bad day.  I don't know about you, but I'm going with Scorpio.

The worst thing about this villain is that we've seen so many like him.  Yes, The Green Hornet is an action-comedy, so he's made silly (and Christoph Waltz sells the material), but he's just lazily written, as are the other villains, the heroes, and even Edward James Olmos as Gravitas Guy.  In fact, the whole thing feels lazy and shambling, including the car chases and the ‘splosions.  I did enjoy how The Green Hornet paints its star as an unrelenting doofus and his sidekick, Kato, as the bright and competent one, but even that joke got boring after the first fifteen iterations.

Now, Blade Runner, on the other hand: there's a movie.  A sci-fi noir, it offers an intriguing vision of the future, tackles big questions, and creates sufficient ambiguity for thirty years' worth of conversations.

Blade Runner takes place in Los Angeles, 2019 (!).  It's January or February because it's raining, it gets dark early, and its characters can get away with wearing trench coats when they want to look cool.  In this future, short-lived artificial humans known as "replicants" serve as slave labor in the offworld colonies.  Sometimes, they escape and make their way back to Earth.  Harrison Ford plays Rick Deckard, the titular Blade Runner.  His job is to hunt down runaway replicants and kill them.  Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer) is a replicant, but he's stronger, faster, smarter than most.  He's angry because he feels that he was created only to suffer and die.  He wants to face his Creator.  He wants to beg for more years.  He wants to know why he was made.  He wants to lash out.

Even with the unavoidable anachronisms of an older science-fiction property, Blade Runner's world looks and feels futuristic enough to entice the imagination.  There might be slavery on the offworld colonies, but at least there are offworld colonies.  The clothes look different from contemporary fashion, yet they still look like clothes actual people might wear.  Best of all (and like Scott's classic Alien), we can imagine actually living in this world.  We can imagine what it smells like, sounds like. Yes, Blade Runner has flying cars.  But they make sense, and they belong.  [Note: here's a neat little appreciation for Blade Runner's F/X work from Popular Mechanics.]  

The best science fiction, of course, is philosophy or social criticism made up to look like a genre tale.  Blade Runner is more the former, and how.  It's an existential shout at God, asking, "Why am I here?  Why is life so short?  Why do we suffer?"  It mourns the idea of death.  Read Roy Batty's dying words:  "I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain."  Who hasn't despaired in the face of the transience of beauty, of the fleeting nature of joy?  'Of course there's an afterlife,' we tell ourselves.  'Otherwise, all of this would go to waste.'  But if there isn't, oh, oh.

Of course, I'm a guy who welcomes seeing a film as an invitation to explore 2500 years of Western philosophical tradition; but I get that I'm in the minority.  Blade Runner also offers something for people who just like a good mystery.  First, there's the mystery that drives the plot as we're actually sitting in the chair: who are the replicants, where are they, and what do they want?  For coffee afterward, the film leaves open the question of Deckard's identity.  He might be a replicant.  His memories, his history might be implanted.  This ambiguity is baked into the film: Ford says he thought Deckard was human, while director Ridley Scott thought otherwise.  On a related note, what does the Edward James Olmos character know, what does he think about it, and what will he do?  This is chewy, fun stuff: the kind of material that's fuelled many a late-night bull session over the years.

To sum up, Blade Runner is a classic, a masterpiece.  Even if Ridley Scott hadn't made Alien or Thelma and Louise or Black Hawk Down, we'd know his name for this film alone.  Even if you've seen it, even if you love it, it'll be worth your time to see it again.

Alien

Oh, Alien is so good.

Here’s a movie that takes its time in the setup, and it pays huge dividends in the second and third acts.  When the crew members of the space cargo ship Nostromo awaken to a distress call from an alien world, we get to know them.  We get to know their ship and its layout.  These things matter, because the Nostromo’s world is one that has been lived in for quite some time, and we need to feel that it’s commonplace, that these are ordinary Joes doing an ordinary job.

Because when Hell breaks loose, we’ve become keyed up and ready.  When people start dying, we know who they are and have become invested in their fates.  When the alien’s acid blood starts eating through decking, we know what that means and can figure just how close the ship is coming to catastrophic hull breach.

This leads me to wonder: why is this so hard?  Why do so many filmmakers not seem to understand that the key to narrative film, even genre-type horror and science fiction, lies in the characters and their environment?  If we don’t believe in the characters and their world, we won’t believe in their predicaments or their heroism.  If we don’t believe in the characters, all we have is light and sound. 

Alien believes in its characters, and it makes us believe.  That’s what makes the film so effective, so scary, to this very day.  When many of the films we know have passed out of memory, audiences will still watch Alien.  If they’re smart, so will filmmakers.  This film has much to teach them.

Body of Lies

The most arresting sequence in BODY OF LIES, Ridley Scott's latest film, focuses on Russell Crowe's Ed Hoffman, a rumpled CIA division director. Crowe is at home, writing a paper by speaking into a dictaphone, carefully crafting an argument about the nature of Islamic terrorism, the gravity of the threat, and the means necessary to combat it. The scene shifts to Crowe speaking the words to two sharply-dressed political types - he wasn't writing a paper, he was rehearsing a talk. He's wearing a "visitor" badge. The politicos look bored and annoyed that he's taking up their time. He's laying it all out, clearly and concisely. He sees another politico enter the room and he makes a quick exit while the people he'd waylaid sit up, smile, and focus on the newcomer.

Crowe is America's leading expert on Islamic terrorism, and the only way he can get a meeting with high-level decisionmakers is to barge in on their schedules, piss them off, and disappear.

The sequence is brilliant because it puts everything else about the film into perspective. All the punishment Leonardo DiCaprio's CIA operative takes, all the low-level politicking between American and Jordanian intelligence, all the death - it's back page stuff; the big dogs have other bones to gnaw.

But what is happening on that back page, anyway? BODY OF LIES is the first GWOT espionage thriller, and it's a fine piece of storytelling in the best traditions of the genre. It features intricate plots and counterplots, players of various levels of trustworthiness, dangerous love, courage, and cowardice. Its local touches feel authentic, and it has the courage to understand that it may not be the most important thing happening in the world.

I liked this movie; I liked it alot. It had everything I could ask for in an espionage thriller, and its creators are top-flight talent. Even if it is about back-page stuff.

American Gangster

AMERICAN GANGSTER is smart, carefully made, and vastly entertaining. With Denzel Washington and Russel Crowe toplining, and Ridley Scott directing, I wouldn't expect anything else.

In the film, Denzel Washington plays Frank Lucas, the guy whose idea it was to ship heroin to the U.S. in the coffins of KIAs returning from Vietnam. Crowe plays Richie Roberts, the detective who finally figures it all out. Interesting enough, but, as is so often the case, it's all in the execution.

And the execution is first rate. Washington and Crowe are two of the best actors working today, and it's always a pleasure to watch them do their thing. Scott took the time to put together a marvelous simulacrum of Vietnam - era New York, populate it with believable people, and make it come alive. I bought into the world of this film, I bought into the people living in this world, and I lost track of time as I grew engrossed in their world.

This is good stuff, team.