Daily Archives: Monday, October 26, 2015

  • The Martian

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Ridley Scott (2015)

    The crew of Ares III, a manned mission to Mars, are forced to abandon the planet quickly when a huge ‘Martian storm’ hits their base there.  One of the crew – wrongly presumed dead – is left behind.   The Martian is the story of Mark Watney’s DIY survival on Mars and, once NASA discovers he’s still alive, the political and scientific calculations involved in rescuing him.  Ridley Scott is not a humorist but there are quite a few jokes in the script.  Most of them made me slightly embarrassed but plenty of those flocking to see The Martian may well feel differently.  The jokes include a running joke.  The only music available for Mark to listen to in the crew’s temporary artificial Martian habitat is the compilation of disco tracks of which the mission commander is fond.  Mark keeps telling us how much he hates disco but the songs keep him going.  The great soundtrack kept this viewer of The Martian going too – in spite of the funny ha-ha aptness of some of the titles (‘Don’t Leave Me This Way, ‘I Will Survive’) and although it’s stretching it to include ‘Starman’ in a disco line-up.  Whatever one thinks of the attempted comedy and the choice of music, both are nifty ways of sustaining a light-years distance between the often playful register of this film and the pompous solemnity of last year’s Interstellar.  The Martian doesn’t have either the instantly distinctive look or the brevity of the sci-fi-smash-hit-before-last, Gravity:  this new film (141 minutes) is a lot closer in running time to Interstellar (169 minutes) than to Alfonso Cuaron’s movie (91 minutes).  But Ridley Scott is willing and able to give the audience – or, at least, those who take their science fiction not too seriously – a much better time than Christopher Nolan.

    The Martian has a screenplay by Drew Goddard, based on a best-selling 2011 novel of the same name by Andy Weir.  Scott and Goddard realise that the Cast Away-in-space narrative isn’t enough on its own for a big-budget movie.  (Perhaps Andy Weir does too – I’ve not read the book – although telling the story wholly in the form of Mark Watney’s diary might be less of an issue in print than it would be on screen.)   Ridley Scott’s balancing of sequences on Mars and on Earth is well judged – the terrestrial politicking gets better as the film goes on – and he’s breezily brazen about artificially delaying narrative developments in order to achieve more impact when he chooses eventually to use them.  For example, there’s a point, well after NASA knows that Mark has survived, when you start to think the other members of the Ares III crew, en route back to Earth in their spacecraft Hermes, have been forgotten about more than Mark ever was.  It’s pretty weak that the NASA people don’t discuss the pros and cons of informing the rest of the crew that he’s still alive – and especially hard to believe NASA would have nothing more than an awkward silence with which to answer Mark, when he eventually asks what his Ares III colleagues think about his survival.  Mark’s mother and father must have ticked a ‘no publicity’ box:  we never get to see them or learn how they’re feeling – their son on Mars seems to remember his parents’ existence only late in the day.   In spite of the concerns expressed by NASA’s head of public relations about the PR implications of each major plot development, we get no sense at all of public reaction – until, in a globetrotting montage, the populations of the world’s great cities gather in the streets to watch, on giant screens, the climactic, successful attempt to rescue Mark.   (Even I found this eventual pick-up sequence exciting.)

    The Wikipedia article on The Martian sets the story in the 2030s; according to Michael Wood’s review in the London Review of Books, some conscientious viewers have narrowed things down to a single year (2035) and Andy Weir has confirmed they’re correct.   But Ridley Scott and Drew Goddard follow Weir’s example in the novel of not being temporally specific.  This is sensible for two reasons:  first, it limits the need for the film-makers to make adjustments to planet Earth as it is today; second, because the audience’s perspective isn’t dominated by an awareness that events are happening in a very different time, there’s a real salience to the various kinds of resourcefulness shown by Mark (who’s a botanist), NASA boffins and an eccentric astrodynamics whizzkid.  For a scientific ignoramus like me anyway, this felt like an unusual instance of the science and the fiction of sci-fi being nicely and quite enjoyably balanced.

    Matt Damon’s performance as Mark Watney is entirely successful.  Damon’s relaxed, low-key acting is ideal for the role and the device of Mark’s speaking to camera as he records a video log a simple, effective way of reinforcing Damon’s engagement with the cinema audience.  The strict rationing of emotionality ensures that, on the rare occasions that Mark does get upset, they register.  Jessica Chastain builds her portrait of Melissa Lewis, the Ares III mission commander, very skilfully:  she conveys Melissa’s continuing sense of guilty responsibility for leaving Mark behind without ever losing the professional, bossy edge which reminds you that, and why, Melissa’s in charge.  Although she doesn’t immediately strike you as a disco music fan, Melissa definitely livens up once she gets word from her husband on Earth that he’s managed to find a vinyl LP of Abba’s greatest hits in a fleamarket.  The crew members also include Aksel Hennie, Kata Mara, Sebastian Stan and Michael Peña.  As often before, Peña is the sympathetic Latino member of a team – fortunately, he really is sympathetic.

    Back at mission control …  as Teddy Sanders, the NASA supremo, Jeff Daniels needs more distinction early on between his press-conference and behind-closed-doors faces.  Daniels grew on me, though, and is particularly funny in the scene in which Rich Purnell (Donald Glover), the thinking-out-of-the-box astrodynamicist, demonstrates to NASA top brass the maths (?) he’s done to devise a way for the Hermes crew to turn back and pick Mark up from Mars.   Chiwetel Ejiofor is good, and surprisingly entertaining, as Vincent Kapoor, NASA’s Mars mission director; and I particularly liked Mackenzie Davis’s witty, well-judged playing of Mindy Park, the junior satellite planner who’s the first to pick up that Mark Watney is still alive.   Kirsten Wiig is OK as NASA’s head of PR – it’s just that I kept expecting her to deliver a punchline and she didn’t.  In contrast, Eddy Ko and Chen Shu, as the representatives of the Chinese space agency, which decides to lend NASA a technological helping hand, are inadvertently comical.  The chi-chi outfits and hairdos they’ve been given are, at any rate.   The only significant NASA player I didn’t care for was Sean Bean, as Mitch Henderson, the Hermes flight director.  I realise Henderson is meant to be dourly conscience-driven but Sean Bean is tedious beyond the call of duty.

    As usual with a techno-blockbuster, I’ll take it as read that the special effects are brilliant – except that the body double for the supposedly emaciated Matt Damon is highly unconvincing.  (Damon’s square-shaped head makes it hard for him to look gaunt – even when you can tell, in the later scenes, that he himself has lost some weight.)  Although it’s inevitably eclipsed by the disco classics, Harry Gregson-Williams’s score is commendable for being less portentous than the music in this kind of movie tends to be.  As a result of the Martian storm, Mark Watney sustains an abdominal injury: he has to remove the spike of an antenna buried in his flesh and stitch himself up.   This repair to an astronaut’s stomach seemed to rhyme, rather satisfyingly, with the explosion of the alien organism out of John Hurt’s chest in the first Alien thirty-six years ago.   I walked out of that Ridley Scott movie but I didn’t find it difficult to see The Martian through.   This is higher praise than it sounds.

    12 October 2015

     

  • Zero Dark Thirty

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Kathryn Bigelow (2012)

    For what it is, Kathryn Bigelow’s account of ‘The Greatest Manhunt in History’ – for Osama bin Laden – is very well done.  And what it is is a series of expert reconstructions – of post-9/11 terrorist attacks and, in the movie’s climax, the raid on bin Laden’s hideout in Abbottabad, Pakistan in May 2011.   A legend at the start explains that what we’re about to see is ‘based on first-hand accounts of actual events’.  This statement is carefully worded and completely ambiguous.  It could mean that the witnesses to the events in question told a pack of lies.  It certainly means that Bigelow and the screenwriter Mark Boal can do what they like in presenting or departing from what really happened.  Zero Dark Thirty has generated controversy – about how the film-makers gained access to classified information and for the ‘pro-torture’ position which some commentators have inferred from the film.   The torture scenes – mainly the interrogation of a man with links to Saudi terrorists – dominate the first part.  For me, they came across not as a political statement but as an uneasy compromise between fact and fiction.  These sequences, grim as they are, don’t have the rawness of actual filmed footage.  They’re underdeveloped as drama because the characters involved don’t mean very much to us at this stage – although one of them, a young CIA operative called Maya who is the movie’s main character, comes to mean more.   This foreshadows an essential and pervasive limitation of Zero Dark Thirty.

    Because Bigelow’s priority is to create brilliantly realistic action set pieces, it’s difficult for the actors to blend in with the movie’s style and still register.  Some of them blend in at the expense of being interesting – Jason Clarke (as Maya’s fellow officer, Dan), Joel Edgerton (the leader of the Red Squadron that carries out the Abbottabad raid), Chris Pratt (a US Navy Seal).  Edgerton and Pratt are just about indistinguishable.  At the opposite extreme, Jennifer Ehle (another CIA officer) registers by hogging the camera:  she destroys the rhythm of Zero Dark Thirty every time she appears.  Given what Kathryn Bigelow seems to be trying to do, the casting of Ehle is bizarre.  Her playing is not only attention-getting but arrogant:  in her precise calculation of every detail and how the camera will pick this up, Ehle looks to be trying to invite comparison with Meryl Streep.  (There is no comparison – although there is an irony in seeing an imitation of the acting technique of a genius of imitation.)  There are other surprising pieces of casting.  As a senior officer in the Agency, Mark Strong gets off to a really bad start:  he storms into a room full of downplayed CIA colleagues and acts his head off.  He’s much better in quieter moments later but Strong’s effort not only to sustain an American accent but to make it sound natural (it doesn’t) sticks out of the faux-documentary texture.  Stephen Dillane as the National Security Advisor looks to be keeping the lid on what he really could do.  Only two of the actors succeed in staying in context without a loss of animation – James Gandolfini as the CIA boss and Jessica Chastain as Maya.

    As written by Mark Boal, Maya is a pretty cliched character.  At first, we see her physically flinch from the torture in which she’s participating in a way that her male colleagues don’t.  Then she turns into a woman with more balls than any of the men around her.  In a meeting to discuss the suburban compound in Abbottabad, Maya interrupts the cautious language coming from round the table by introducing herself to the Gandolfini character as ‘the motherfucker who found this place, sir’.  When, later on, Gandolfini asks the team whether they think it’s bin Laden who’s in there, Maya blasts through the tentative 60% probability ratings of the men:  she’s 100% sure – then downgrades to 95% ‘because I know certainty freaks you guys out’.   I was no less certain that, once bin Laden had been killed, the film would end with a shot of Maya wondering, after devoting the whole of her recent life to the hunt for him, what the hell she would do next.  Jessica Chastain makes everything about Maya more interesting than it deserves to be.  She may look rattled as she stands in the torture chamber but she speaks strongly and definitely to those on the receiving end of waterboarding etc.  In that final shot, she expresses genuinely mixed feelings, which include relief and distress.  Chastain’s nuanced straightforwardness is a refreshing contrast to the clenched, monotonous intensity of Claire Danes as the supposedly bipolar heroine of Homeland, even though Bigelow and Boal occasionally nudge Maya’s character in the same direction as Danes’s – for example in her angry, repeated scrawling on the glass of her superior’s office door of the number of days that have passed without progress in taking bin Laden.  (There’s also a senior CIA man seen on his prayer mat, which recalls the Muslim the Damian Lewis character has turned into in Homeland.)   The excitement of Jessica Chastain’s alert acting comes less from what she’s doing here than from thinking of the range of characters she’s already played and the prospect of what may be to come.  Maya isn’t satisfying because she’s essentially a character in a documentary – and further removed from the centre of the movie than the Jeremy Renner character was in The Hurt Locker.   In one sense, it’s pleasingly unconventional that Kathyryn Bigelow, during the climactic raid on the bin Laden compound, doesn’t keep cutting back to Maya’s reactions.  But this isn’t self-discipline or imagination on the director’s part:  she’s not that interested in Maya anyway.

    The individual impact of each of the series of terrorist attacks depends largely on your familiarity with it.   Any British viewer is going to know what will happen to the London bus on 7 July 2005 and, in my case, exactly where it will happen.  I didn’t know, or had forgotten details of, the Camp Chapman attack in 2009, so this was more startling.  A legend announcing the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad immediately rang a bell but I have to thank Jennifer Ehle for taking me by surprise in this episode:  I was so mesmerised by her selfish acting that I’d forgotten a bomb was going to go off in the hotel restaurant.  During the final assault in Abbottabad, I admit the main suspense for me consisted in whether we would get sight of bin Laden (the sight we didn’t get on real-life television news).  The editing by Dylan Tichenor and William Goldenberg, excellent throughout the movie, is never better than it is inside the compound and in the aftermath to the raid – in what you do and don’t see.  The Abbottabad raid is impressive in other ways too – like the weird, alarming combination of masked sci-fi-ish faces, weeping kids and screaming women that recur on the screen as the Seals penetrate deeper into the compound.

    Sally, who really liked the film, felt this whole extended sequence reminded you of how variously hazardous the operation was:  I think this confirms that Bigelow’s ideal viewer is someone who, like the director, is primarily interested in the meticulous recreation of real events.  I guess I approached Zero Dark Thirty more as a moviegoer – and what’s amazing in reality is par for the course in a live action dramatic film.  By the same token, Bigelow keeps the atmosphere of the raid scrupulously bleak but, if you’re watching as someone primed to distinguish heroes and villains, you’ll want the Seals to get their man.  The movie is fully realised – on its own terms – in this final section.   Elsewhere, Bigelow seems less decisive.  She starts with what’s presumably an actual recording of a conversation with someone trapped in the World Trade Center on 9/11.  Removing the usual images of the day is obviously meant to make this introduction more powerful; because this effect is so calculated, it’s actually rather offensive.  The text on screen during the film – alternating indications of where and when events are taking place with chapter headings (‘The Meeting’, ‘Tradecraft’, ‘The Canaries’ etc) – suggests a lack of confidence in the narrative’s ability to cope by itself, without these signposts.  Like many of this year’s front runners for awards, Zero Dark Thirty is too long (157 minutes) but at least time passes more quickly as the film goes on.

    2 February 2013

Posts navigation