The Martian has earned a spot as my favorite movie of the year. It is the best Ridley Scott-directed film to hit theaters since Alien (though his director's cut of Kingdom of Heaven could have been a contender). Matt Damon, in what is becoming a recurring theme for his characters, plays Mark Watney, a botanist stranded on Mars when his crew is forced to evacuate due to a storm. With only the supplies and equipment left behind to help him survive for the several years it will take to mount a return mission, he must draw on his genius to solve problems even MacGyver couldn't handle.
I like to jokingly refer to this as the 'Anti-Gravity', since his problem is to survive while trying to get off-planet as opposed to Sandra Bullock's character needing to survive while returning to ground. In fact, most accidents in space travel will kill you very very quickly, as seen in Gravity. The Martian, on the other hand, presents the possibilities of inevitable slow death by starvation or depletion of resources over an extended period of time in a hostile environment. The only solution, as Watney says, is to 'science the shit out of it', and one of the strongest reasons I love it is you can honestly say it puts the science back in science fiction.
There are, of course, mistakes or deliberate oversights made in service to the dramatic pace. It's still just a movie, but if you are someone who doesn't spend time reading hard science novels or perusing the latest articles on space exploration, the adventure will still be rewarding. And if you ARE into the science, you will likely find yourself thinking through the problems you would face in this 'Cast Away in space'.
I haven't enjoyed a movie set in space this much since Duncan James' Moon. It was fortunate that I hadn't read the novel by Andy Weir on which it is based. I could enjoy Drew Goddard's script without nitpicking over the differences or omissions. I have several friends who work at NASA and JPL, and the character portrayals are spot-on, true to type. The visuals set a new bar, with incredible vistas of the Martian landscape that draw on the latest NASA imaging and perfectly composed 3D that never distracts or feels unnatural. This is the next best thing to actually being on the surface of Mars. I can't heap enough praises on this. Go see it. If you like it, see it again as I will be doing. Vote with your dollars for excellent films.
The Keeping Room was one of the first and best films I saw at Fantastic Fest this year. It was written by Julia Hart based on an idea that came to her when a friend recounted a family legend about two union soldiers buried in the yard of her farmhouse. Directed by Daniel Barber, it stars Brit Marling as a southern woman who must defend her home and ailing sister (Hailee Steinfeld) with the help of the family slave Mad (brilliantly portrayed by Muna Otaru) against invasion by two of William T Sherman's scouts (Sam Worthington and Kyle Soller).
It is unique to see a film that presents a picture of the Civil War from the perspective of a small farming family rather than the traditional dichotomy of wealthy plantation owners vs union industrialists. This brings to our attention something that is an uncomfortable and unpopular fact, which is that the war caused the suffering of untold numbers of people in the south. Not just the slave-owning elites in their mansions, but women and children left behind when their sons and husbands went to war, the poor sharecroppers who did not traffic in human lives, and the slaves themselves (perhaps especially the slaves) suffered as Sherman's strategy of total warfare raided food stores, burned forests, crops, and homes, forcing the displacement and threatening millions with starvation.
As Marling's character Augusta in a powerful and revealing moment chides her sister Louise (Steinfeld) who has attempted to assert superiority over Mad, "We all niggers now". Never wealthy, but once well-off, the family has been broken by the death of their mother to illness and conscription of their father and brother into the Confederate army. As the events of the film unfold, the relationship between the petulant Louise and Mad evolves poignantly through their shared experiences as childhood victims of white men, and Otaru's monologue as she recounts the horror of her youth is as worthy as any Oscar-winning performance I have ever seen. Hart's script makes no bones about the real monsters in the south.
Finally, I should make note of Sam Worthington's performance here which is a career-best. As loathsome as his character's deeds are, he manages to almost make you like him before his work is done. I'm afraid you'll have to see to understand. I think few people saw this at the fest, and fewer still were talking about it, but I was very pleased to see Drafthouse Films distributing it. I feel it is one of their most powerful releases to date.
