Tag: Chiwetel Ejiofor

The Martian

Matt Damon stars in Ridley Scott’s adaptation of Andy Weir’s sci-fi novel ‘The Martian’

TheMartianPosterThe most impossible feat in Ridley Scott’s “The Martian” is not that a man can survive on Mars. “The Martian” is refreshingly optimistic, a movie that believes in not just the ingenuity and resourcefulness of mankind but the camaraderie and good-nature. It speaks to the power of the Internet and society in the 21st Century to collectively find a solution, but also rally around a moment in history. At the end of “The Martian” the whole world is watching in a unified sensation to see if Mark Watney will make it back alive. That’s an inspiring fantasy we only see in the movies, and one even less common in 2015.

Who better to incite humanity’s collective attention and care than an everyman movie star like Matt Damon? Damon here embodies pure American values and a can-do attitude, even as he sheepishly blows himself up or loses his cool. He’s a guy, above all, the kind of guy you’d want to be stuck alone on a planet with, but he’s a movie star and he’s better than you, so he’s exactly the person we want to root for.

Damon is Mark Watney, a member of a mission to Mars that goes wrong when a violent storm strands Mark from his team, who leave him for dead on the red planet. When he wakes, he quickly realizes his survival hinges on lasting long enough for another manned mission to arrive, potentially as long as four years, on communicating with NASA to let them know he’s still alive, and to grow food on a planet where nothing grows.

Good news! “I’m a botanist,” he proclaims, as if to say, “Challenge accepted. Bring it, Mars.” Mark gins up a way to grow potatoes for as long as four years, he finds a way to create water (just take two parts hydrogen and add oxygen. Not that anything bad has ever happened with humans trying to manipulate hydrogen), and he harvests leftover plutonium and a rover from previous Mars missions.

Back on Earth, NASA’s scientists have to be worn down over time to reject their cynicism. They’re all calculations and risk, dismissing Mark’s initially rudimentary attempts to communicate. Soon they’ll come around, and so do we. There’s not a moment in “The Martian” where we don’t believe in Mark’s gumption to survive or his creativity in McGyvering a solution, even something as simple as “Duct tape fixes everything.”

Part of that is “The Martian’s” embrace of science and logic. “The Martian” is methodical and practical in its explanation as to how Mark will survive, and the film never harbors an illusion that it’s about anything else but the ability to tackle the impossible.

But another part is that the film is perhaps quieter and more contemplative than the edge-of-your-seat thrill ride that was “Gravity”, another lost-in-space film with impossible odds. Mark communicates via video logs, so “The Martian” isn’t quite as reserved as something like “All is Lost”, but it sets aside time for Mark to enjoy some bad disco music or to bemoan running out of ketchup.

“Gravity” never had time for such scenes in its slick 90 minutes, and while that film found incredible economy by never setting back down on Earth, “The Martian’s” Earthbound scenes don’t feel like an after thought. Scott paces the film in dual, cross-cutting action, with NASA and JPL engineering the same solutions for communication or for outfitting a rover as Mark is figuring things out. Chiwetel Ejiofor and Jeff Daniels make sparks as NASA’s two directors debating how best to allocate resources to rescue Mark. And following “Magic Mike XXL”, this is the second film this year in which Donald Glover shows up halfway through and stops the show with his captivating performance.

When Sandra Bullock touched down on Earth, she was all alone on an idyllic lake. “The Martian” visualizes a breathtaking and inspiring homecoming in Times Square, with the whole world hooked on Mark’s safe return. Such a sight seems as unlikely today as a man trapped on another planet. But “The Martian” earns those lofty aspirations and positive, inspirational sensations because it believed in them to begin with.

4 stars

Z for Zachariah

Craig Zobel’s follow-up to ‘Compliance’ is an intimate love story set at the end of the world.

Z_for_Zachariah_posterThe indie drama “Z for Zachariah” is a post-apocalyptic sci-fi in name only. Movies such as this year’s “Ex Machina” or the horror film “The Babadook” have played with genre as their setting to tell what is essentially a contemporary story. The scene and the plot are merely set dressing for a bigger parable.

Craig Zobel’s (Compliance) film however maintains such a tenuous relationship to its post-apocalyptic scenario that it’s a wonder he didn’t do away with it entirely. “Z for Zachariah” follows the survivor of a radiation outbreak living peacefully alone in her country farm and how she comes to care and love another survivor who stumbles across her home.

More so than a sci-fi, “Z for Zachariah” is a marital romance, and eventually a love triangle. It deals with questions of intimacy, faith, commitment, trust, personality and habit. None of the preceding has much to do with the act of surviving a nuclear outbreak, but these themes are contained in well-drawn and acted characters and a tender, theatrical scope.

Ann (Margot Robbie) is a country girl living in her secluded slice of the world, a valley that has remained untainted by radiation and the effects that seem to have wiped out humanity. John (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is another resourceful survivor who has made his way to the valley, only to fall sick and in need of Ann’s help for survival.

In them we see how tragedy, need and circumstance has brought out their core beliefs. It’s a battle of faith versus science, as Ann falls back on her Christian upbringing to help her sustain, while John is analytical and logical. He devises a plan to bring electricity back to her farm, but only at the expense of tearing down Ann’s cherished chapel.

They grow close and nearly intimate but withhold their temptations. These things need time, and they’ve got nothing but time, John explains. That changes when the drifter-type Caleb (Chris Pine) arrives on their doorstep. He’s a slick country boy with an equal helping of faith that John lacks, and his mere presence consistently makes him an untrustworthy figure driving a stake between Ann and John.

Ejiofor quite often steals the show, paring dialogue down to its quietest and simplest. He just seems profound and shrouded in feeling no matter when he’s speaking, including a bombshell about his past before arriving on the farm. But he even gets the chance to stretch himself, playing broad when initially exposed to radiation and comic when he gets drunk and learns that Ann, “even at the end of the world, ain’t gonna drink no cherry soda.”

Pine too has proven with this film he can act, casting sly glares and piercing glances that keep his character’s intentions ambiguous. As for Robbie, she’s a budding star who earns her keep as a tough, capable farm owner despite how low-key and coy she remains. Ann unfortunately becomes “the woman” and has far less to do once Caleb arrives and turns the romance into a love triangle.

Together the three of them bring unexpected depth to a story that’s as worn and traveled as the man at the end of the world. And yet Zobel can do little more than make his film a travelogue. Shot in New Zealand but done up to look like the American South, “Z for Zachariah” is less an atmospheric story than its plot suggests. The film is intimate enough that it could sub on stage, but it loses some of its cinematic qualities. in the process

Near the film’s ambiguous ending, Caleb expresses a desire to travel further south in search of what word has is a community of survivors, despite the refuge he’s found. Take “Z for Zachariah” out of the apocalypse and you’d have the same movie. That core story is something quaint and special, but there must be something more out there.

3 stars

12 Years a Slave

“12 Years a Slave” is the heaviest, hardest film to watch of the year, but it’s much more than a grim history lesson.

A black woman in tatters is sitting in a cart crying uncontrollably as she pulls up to a luxurious Southern plantation home. A wealthy white woman comes to greet her new “property” and asks her husband why this one is in tears. She’s been separated from her children in the slave trade; it couldn’t be helped, he explains. “Poor woman,” the new master opines, “Your children will soon be forgotten.”

Such coldness despite an occasionally glossy and soothing tone is business as usual in the masterpiece “12 Years a Slave.” Like the stylish but burdensome “Shame” before it, Steve McQueen’s film is by far the heaviest, most difficult film to endure of the year. It should not be taken lightly that this is a film about slavery and all its harsh colors. Such devastating films are usually just about braving it only to learn a history lesson. “12 Years a Slave” is about maintaining your fortitude and still knowing who you are when you come out the other side.

The film is quite simply the story of a free black man living in upstate New York in 1840 who was kidnapped and sold into slavery for 12 years. That the man lived to tell his tale and write the memoir that inspired this film is magnificent enough. But McQueen uses Solomon Northup’s (Chiwetel Ejiofor) story to show us what freedom is. It’s not the ability to live in wealth and privilege, to live free of pain or to be allowed to walk where you please. Northup earned his freedom by remembering who he was when the time came. Being strong enough to retain that memory: that’s freedom. Continue reading “12 Years a Slave”