"Knight Of Cups"

This review has been moved to http://vulturehound.co.uk/2016/05/where-did-i-go-wrong-knight-of-cups-film-review/

"Cabin In The Sky"

To watch Golden Age Hollywood films is to unconsciously assimilate the notion of whiteness as the default. So white are the majority of these films’ casts that the appearance of any black person, be it a tertiary role or a silent extra, comes almost as a shock, a brief reminder of an entire segment of the American population’s existence – and of their general absence in their own country’s audiovisual stories.

Arguably worse still is the stereotypical, subservient nature of most parts black performers did get in mainstream Hollywood features.  For all intents and purposes, those were still written, directed and produced by white men in a legally segregated era. As such, screen depictions of black people dating from that period naturally invite caution within the progressive-minded viewer: How accurate can they be? How efficiently can their performers mine them for genuine human truth that rises above the limits imposed by racist writing?

Films like Cabin In The Sky, a 1943 adaptation of the 1940 musical of the same name with an all-black cast, are most illustrative of that problem. Its simple, cartoonish characterization of issues frequently associated with the black working class (gambling, organized crime and sexual promiscuity vs. monogamy and religious piety) causes discomfort, as does Eddie “Rochester” Anderson’s bumbling performance as Little Joe Jackson, a simple-minded illiterate sinner struggling to stay on the righteous path after a long period of gambling and infidelity. There is hardly a single Post-Reconstruction Southern Black Stereotype box that is not ticked. It’s difficult not to see the story’s vision of Christianity as a means to keep poor Black people content with their life, rather than a sustaining force of spiritual sustenance and resilience in the face of systemic oppression.

And yet, director Vincente Minnelli’s efforts to stay true to the African-American spiritual traditions that inspired the play’s original (white) creators are palpable throughout the film: An early gospel number in the church starts with the camera slowly panning left to right from a children’s choir to the adults next to them, then upwards as the song builds up in intensity, following the spread of an (unheard) rumour from person to person, pausing for each solo number, until it reaches Little Joe’s wife Petunia (Ethel Waters) on the backrow. After a wide shot of the congregation singing the chorus, we cut to a close-up of the radiant Waters repeating it one last time with almost tearful fervor. In only three shots, Minnelli has succinctly conveyed the kind of ecstatic communion non-churchgoers such as me can never truly understand.

As Petunia, Ethel Waters is one of the pillars of the film’s success. Just as she would do nine years later as Berenice Sadie Brown in Fred Zinnemann’s adaptation of The Member Of The Wedding, she transcends racial stereotypes with what can only be described as pure, unaffected soul, built by a lifetime of love, hardship and endurance. When Petunia convinces God to give Joe another chance after his backsliding leads to a near-fatal encounter with a local small-time gangster, you have no trouble believing her prayer was “the most powerful piece of praying [they] heard up there in a long time”. The unfalsifiable heart she bestows upon Petunia expertly counters – and corrects – Rochester’s stereotyped antics, and brings much-needed depth to the story.

The film’s premise and narration are so strikingly similar to Jack Chick’s fundamentalist tracts – particularly the patronizing “adapted for black audiences” ones – that I’m almost positive it helped inspire them: Stereotypical characters, one man’s soul becoming the object of a high-stakes competition between angels and pantomime demons, a happy ending in which the sinner gets saved, presumably never to be tempted by evil again…

However, there are many artistic and narrative decisions that, while perhaps not entirely subversive, make Cabin In The Sky slightly more complex than your average Chick tract. For one thing, the border between the righteous and the sinners isn’t as fixed or solid as it initially seems: The demons’ plan to corrupt Joe with an unexpected lottery win and the seductive powers of his old flame Georgia Brown (Lena Horne) initially backfire when Joe overcomes Georgia’s advances and decides to use the money to buy Petunia all the things she wanted but couldn’t afford. Evil only gains its advantage back when Petunia catches the two together at just that moment, draws the wrong conclusion and kicks Joe out before giving him time to explain himself. By the film’s climax, Petunia has reduced herself to provoking her husband by crashing his party, trading barbs with his mistress and fraternizing with the man who tried to kill him, all to get him back. And after the ensuing fight kills them both, Petunia is still granted a place in heaven due to her prayer for divine intervention (in the form of tornado stock-footage borrowed from The Wizard Of Oz), whereas Joe gets off on a technicality when Georgia converts to Christianity off-screen and donates all the money he gave her to the church!

Such a scenario would be unthinkable in a Chick tract, or indeed in any fundamentalist work of fiction, in which the “saved” remain in a state of perfect grace from which they never budge and the “unsaved” can only hope to join them or perish in Hell. In Cabin In The Sky, the struggle between God (represented by an angel dressed like a Union general) and Satan (represented by his ambitious son, Lucifer Jr.) for the soul of man resembles a competition between two rival companies for an important client’s money; a competition in which both parties are willing to circumvent laws and exploit loopholes to get their way.

This playful, at times almost irreverent attitude towards religion is reflected in the musical numbers. As would become characteristic of his style, Minnelli shoots them in long tracking shots that pan away from his actors and back again, drawing the viewer deeper into the song and allowing more complete action within them. Suspended in the unity of movement and time, the viewer experiences the characters’ dancing and singing as extensions of their natural corporal expression rather than interruptions thereof, which makes the small disturbances at the end of their numbers – such as Joe breaking his walking stick in the final notes of the title song or Petunia’s odd clapping and tapping (accompanied by Joe’s shocked “Petunia!”) at the conclusion of “Taking A Chance On Love” – all the more remarkable. Little jolts of unexpected spontaneity such as these that elevate Cabin In The Sky from its regressive elements.

The very casting of Lena Horne as Georgia Brown functions in a similar way; being a 1940s single black woman who is sexually confident, independent and expressive, the plot naturally treats her as an almost literal puppet whose every action follows Lucifer Jr.’s instructions. Yet in spite of this structural misogyny, Horne’s natural sexiness blooms in every frame; far from denying, subverting or downplaying it, Minnelli’s direction exalts and exacerbates her to a state of impossible glamour. All of these choices, which include Lucifer Jr. making a passing reference to the ongoing Second World War (and possibly what little Americans knew of Nazi atrocities?) – “The whole trouble is I’m stuck with a bunch of B-idea men; all the A-boys is over there in Europe!” – demonstrate surprising political consciousness on the part of Minnelli and his team. So much of the story’s fundamentally puritan substance is undermined at every turn that the all-just-a-dream ending, while initially disappointing, comes across, in hindsight, as an inevitability.

Equally amazing is how perfectly these smuggled moments of audacity coexist with Minnelli’s masterful and sincere visual translation of the ideas and sentiments behind old-time gospel. Nowhere is it exemplified with more gusto than in the wonderfully spooky start of Joe’s near-death experience, in which a giant shadow darkens the room before reducing itself to reveal the shape of Lucifer Jr. against the wall, all while the curtains on Joe’s window billow in a silent wind. In moment such as this, which strangely recalls Reverend A. W. Nix’s classic hellfire-and-brimstone singing sermon “Black Diamond Express Train To Hell”, the songs and tales that founded Black American Christianity come alive with wit and imagination that no fundamentalist cartoon could ever hope to match.

Cabin In The Sky was Vincente Minnelli’s first feature-length film, with an uncredited Busby Berkeley directing John William Sublett’s performance of “Shine” near the film’s climax. Boasting an impressive cast of black singers and musicians that included Louis Armstrong – whose musical number was sadly deleted, reducing his part to a mere cameo – and Duke Ellington, it earned well beyond its humble $679,000 budget, gathering a total of $1,953,000 at the box-office. Modern audiences may understandably be put off by its dated racial and gender politics, but keen observers will likely appreciate its ability to achieve small moments of transcendental humanity that temporarily break through the segregation era’s sociocultural barriers.

"A Most Violent Year"

From the increasing reverence that has characterized mainstream media outlets’ reception of each new J. C. Chandor film, you’d think he was one of contemporary American cinema’s greatest artists. After Margin Call’s Oscar-nominated screenplay wowed enough critics with its sympathetic insider’s perspective on a broken financial system to make them overlook its formal inadequacies, All Is Lost’s novel blend of humanism (symbolized by the ingenious casting of all-American liberal icon Robert Redford) and vaguely Herzogian nihilism proved Chandor to possess an indisputable degree of talent that doesn’t always rise above his given objectives. An assessment that his most recent film, 2014’s A Most Violent Year, confirms even as it evidences continued progress in the visual implementation of his ideas.

All three of J. C. Chandor’s feature films share a common attempt at examining the myth of American individualism by pitting its representatives against the unseen and uncontrollable forces of an all-powerful system. In each case, the individual in question’s own hubris is largely responsible for bringing them in the heart of the storm. In A Most Violent Year, that person is Abel Morales, owner of a growing oil supply business only a million and a half dollars away from being truly independent. Conscientious, scrupulous and earnest to a fault, his commitment to being a late 20^th-century model of the American Dream is exactly what keeps holding him back from responding effectively to the mysterious assaults and hijackings of his truck drivers. As played by Oscar Isaac, he recalls Al Pacino’s Michael Corleone from The Godfather, calmly doing his utmost to play by the rules in a system that demands he break them to survive and prosper.

A most appropriate model that’s one of many Chandor conjures in the hope of aligning his film with the great American crime dramas of the 1970s: Godfather-esque interiors lit with heavy yellow or beige colours – including a restaurant scene that plays out like a cross between the first movie’s restaurant scene and the meeting of the Five Families, a cold and inhospitable New York reminiscent of Serpico, a late car chase whose tightening spaces and dirty industrial areas evokes The French Connection until a combination of dark tunnels and red lights turn it into a nightmare… There’s a myriad of visual and structural callbacks that suggest an ambition on Chandor’s part to align his story with many other films that used organized street crime narratives – often based on true stories – to interrogate American identity. The last notable film of such a kind was Kevin Asch’s Holy Rollers, which tried to create a modern Jewish tragedy by linking assimilation to crime as a means to secure a rite of passage into adulthood. Although pertinent at times, it yielded mixed results.

A Most Violent Year, whose gently pressuring Hasidic landlords serve a purpose similar to that of the orthodox patriarchs in Holly Rollers, does a better job of laying out its characters’ conflicting desires but similarly falls short of its lofty ambitions. The blame goes partly to Chandor’s unsteady, occasionally shallow direction; he’s certainly grown more adventurous since Margin Call, but he’s retained his penchant for making his composition and framing choices speak over his actors rather than in concordance with them. Scenes of Abel’s wife Anna (the ever talented Jessica Chastain) pressuring him to conform to the image of a traditional American patriarch – armed, ready to use violence and get his hands dirty to protect his family/property – have the workings of classic American gangster tragedy (think White Heat or Mystic River) but, good as his actors’ performances may individually be, Chandor seems to have trouble bringing out their driving impulses in a truly significant way. When the climax sees Anna use an unsuspected last-resort measure to pull her husband out of trouble, the effect should be one of shocking triple revelations – of her actions, of herself and of the couple’s marriage; what we get instead amounts, emotionally speaking, to little more than a deus ex machina.

J. C. Chandor is evidently an intelligent and thoughtful filmmaker who knows and understands his references. As always, he directs his actors very well – even though many here, such as David Oyelowo as a sympathetic but inflexible D. A., are underused – and scenes such as Abel’s discussion with the sister of a fugitive truck driver prove that he can succeed at taking his audience and characters to the exact emotional places they need to be. But it’s perhaps quite telling that his only effective dissection of the myth of rugged American individualism so far has been a metaphorical one, whose spaces diminished as the stakes increased.

"SPECTRE"

 

Three years ago, Skyfall accomplished a miracle. Coming on the heels of the troubled mess that was Quantum Of Solace, it successfully followed through on the promises made by Casino Royale and reinvigorated a franchise that seemed at a dead end. In and of itself, this was already a praiseworthy achievement, but Skyfall did more than that: It managed to hit every single required note with perfect accuracy all while managing to be more than just a James Bond film. In the hands of Sam Mendes, and with the recruitment of John Logan to the Purvis-Wade screenwriting team, Skyfall became a genuinely moving tragedy of revenge, contrition and transition, bolstered by an absolutely stellar oedipal duel courtesy of Judi Dench and Javier Bardem.

Lightning rarely strikes twice in a row, so to expect SPECTRE to match, let alone surpass Skyfall’s near-perfection was almost bound to yield disappointment. It is therefore a testament to Mendes and his creative team’s strong committed grasp on their material that SPECTRE’s ability to surprise and draw us in its ever-expanding universe is hindered neither by its screenplay’s occasional lapses in judgment nor by its intermittently uneven pacing. Not content with letting Skyfall’s argument for James Bond’s continued cultural relevance stand alone, SPECTRE expands on that idea’s connection to a somewhat naive nostalgia for a “cleaner”, up-close-and-personal approach to espionage and defense in reaction to today’s murky, depersonalized system of drones and mass surveillance.

In his scathing review of the film, the estimable Bob Chipman pointed out how SPECTRE’s central plot – a shadowy international crime syndicate using surveillance culture to infiltrate the government and hijack international intelligence and defense systems for its own ends – is almost identical to the HYDRA scheme that served as Captain America: The Winter Soldier’s critique of post-9/11 defense and espionage policies, which it linked to the American Superhero genre’s inherent temptation towards authoritarianism. This, along with the Craig-era Bond saga’s perceived dependence upon current successful franchises as sources of inspiration, is an entirely valid and reasonable criticism. I would argue, however, that the long history and wide-ranging cultural influence of the James Bond saga not only gives SPECTRE’s use of these plot elements more resonance, it justifies it as a logical development in Bond’s prolonged enterprise of re-adaptation and renewal. Old-school purists may understandably long for the escapist extravaganzas of the Connery-Lazenby-Moore years, but I find Craig-era Bond’s constant confrontation with changing cultural and geopolitical realities to be one of the rebooted franchise’s most fascinating aspects.

Part of that confrontation involves Bond’s archetypically masculine characteristics, which are here half-glamourized, half-identified as toxic, without that identification ever quite turning into outright criticism. The slick walking liquor ad model of yesteryear has evolved into a casual alcoholic whose response to his leading lady turning down his advances is to spend the night in a drunken stupor until he stumbles upon an important discovery. His predatory sexuality, once treated with chortling “boys-will-be-boys” indulgence, becomes acknowledged for what it is in a memorable seduction scene where Bond corners the woman he deliberately widowed against a mirrored wall and begins kissing and caressing her like a sensuous boa constrictor, as her half-closed eyes and intonations waver between intimidation and lust without letting us know which one she’s settling on.

Of course, this is James Bond, so all of these scenes are scripted, staged and shot in such a way that he never stops being cool and charismatic while doing all these things but the difference with Goldfinger and Thunderball’s light-hearted treatment of scenes that come across today as little more than rape is quite palpable. Key to this delicate balance of glamour and distance is Daniel Craig’s performance. At this point, he embodies James Bond as a distinct, fully-rounded character with as little visible effort as breathing, yet you cannot help but marvel at how easy he makes it look. Moving in every frame like a bulked-up panther surveying its domain, he imbues every gesture, smile and glance with an underlying sense of danger. In fight scenes, his controlled savagery suggests violence to be less of a grim unpleasant necessity than it is an opportunity to bring out pent-up issues whose alternative means of expression he has trained himself to forget. With Craig’s justifiable weariness with the role now being common knowledge, concerns over any negative impact on his performance appear without merit; if anything, his fatigue seems to have come in handy for his more comical moments, in which Bond uses his legendary wit to express annoyance at unexpected setbacks. Every line and facial movement is perfectly-timed deadpan. The contrast with the less-sophisticated boyish brute of Casino Royale is remarkable, and one of the unqualified triumphs of the rebooted franchise: in spite of its missteps and troubles, not only has James Bond himself retained a consistent identity whose development remains steady and unfettered, so has the world he evolves in.

A shame that the same development cannot be observed on SPECTRE’s female characters; as the series’ portrayal of Bond has grown in complexity, its portrayal of Bond girls has been slowly but distinctly regressing ever since Eva Green’s Vesper Lynd blew the competition out of the water. Competently played by Léa Seydoux, Madeleine Swann is an especially frustrating example: Set up as an intelligent, independent woman trying to escape her father’s criminal shadow, Madeleine is systematically robbed of agency and spends most of her time on screen following Bond from place to place, getting kidnapped and getting rescued, with her rare active moments feeling like lazy token efforts to maintain a shallow illusion of empowerment. Moneypenny, whose relationship with Bond in Skyfall was one of equals specialized in different domains, only gets a few nicely-written moments in the first half hour before getting sidelined – a waste of perfectly good Naomie Harris.

And then there’s the twist. Just like Star Trek Into Darkness, the creative team has seen fit to bring back the series’ most iconic villain and disguise his return by lying to the public despite every sign (including the film’s own title!) contradicting them. Unlike Star Trek Into Darkness, the archenemy’s reintroduction makes a certain kind of sense within the series’ narrative arc and is executed functionally well. It’s some of the specifics involved that make this return a botched one. While the idea of making Ernst Stavro Blofeld a childhood friend of Bond’s may be corny on paper, it isn't an inherently bad idea. His position as chief mastermind behind the events of Casino Royale and Quantum Of Solace makes sense but the retconning of Skyfall’s Raoul Silva as a SPECTRE agent completely contradicts the latter’s lack of grand vision and purely personal motive, which were precisely what made him such a unique and compelling Bond villain. Worse, the framing of these events as Bond’s punishment for hijacking his father’s affection, aside from unintentionally evoking Austin Powers In Goldmember, makes Blofeld look more like a petty teenager than a criminal mastermind with a tragic background. To Christoph Waltz’s credit, his off-kilter charm – kept in check here, unlike in Big Eyes – considerably downplays the fundamental silliness of his character’s motivation.

In a lesser action-adventure, these problems would derail the entire film, undermining all the goodwill amassed by the first two acts. In SPECTRE, they are, at worst, like irksome little flies interrupting a pleasant outside meal. For all its flaws, the screenplay¹ builds Bond and the MI6 team with care and skill, picking them where they left off in Skyfall and working further on their comradeship and differences. Ben Whishaw’s Q in particular gets to shine as Bond’s reluctant accomplice, with many of the film’s funniest moments resulting from the two men’s conflictual chemistry. Filling in Judi Dench’s prestigious shoes, Ralph Fiennes draws most of his strength from his horn-bucking with Andrew Scott’s wonderfully smug bureaucrat Denbigh.

Conducting this cast with dexterous confidence is Sam Mendes, whose contribution to the maturation of the James Bond franchise cannot be overstated. He doesn’t just bring out the absolute best in his actors. He doesn’t just put the story back on track whenever its mistakes threaten to derail it. He creates a veritable, tangible new world of flesh, blood, light and colour for the James Bond universe to dwell in. As photographed by Hoyte Van Hoytema, car chases, train fights and pre-coital embraces take on a hot, visceral character that sublimates Bond’s impulses like no other film in the series’ history has before. As staged by Mendes, they offer an exhilarating multiplicity of styles, moods and visual ideas. Consider the pre-credits sequence, which opens with an impeccably-executed Touch Of Evil-esque tracking shot, follows on with a short series of stunts worthy of Buster Keaton, then climaxes to an exceptionally intense fight scene on a low-altitude helicopter. In this sequence, as in every action scene, Mendes’s command of perspective, composition, space and timing is on full display; whether Bond is driving a decomposing plane down a snowy slope or throwing every available projectile on the seemingly indomitable Mr. Hinx (a mostly silent, twinkle-eyed Dave Bautista), the camera always knows exactly what to put in and out of the frame and for how long. Even among the good Marvel movies, there is not a single action scene that can compare with anything shot by Sam Mendes featuring Daniel Craig.

If nothing else, SPECTRE is remarkable proof of how resilient the creative team behind the James Bond reboot has shown itself to be and how well its efforts have paid off. Not as accomplished as the franchise’s finest pieces – From Russia With Love, Goldfinger, Licence To Kill, GoldenEye, Casino Royale and Skyfall – but executed with inspiring aplomb, it continues to carve an interesting and promising path for a cultural icon whose staying power appears inexhaustible.

¹Credited to four writers: The Purvis-Wade-Logan trio behind Skyfall and franchise newcomer Jez Butterworth.

"Margin Call"

Making films about the financial world presents the especially tricky challenge of investing viewers into a world where rich men in expensive suits engage with money as an immaterial, almost non-existent entity, in a difficultly decipherable financial jargon whose purpose appears to be the translation of nothingness into wide-ranging real-world results. Oliver Stone’s Wall Street circumvented the problem by using this world of abstractions as a stage for a fairly routine Greek tragedy. Martin Scorsese’s more successful Wolf Of Wall Street took a more outrageous route, using his unparalleled musicality to connect the toxic masculine impulse for instant sexual gratification to the entitlement culture that plagues capitalism.

J. C. Chandor’s feature-length début Margin Call takes a more sober approach altogether, retaining Wall Street’s tragic codes but applying them to a decidedly more relevant aspect of Wall Street culture; namely, the knowledge that, no matter what they do, somebody, somewhere is going to be negatively affected by their calculations and speculations. When promising young risk analyst Peter Sullivan (Zachary Quinto) gets entrusted with sensitive data by his just-fired boss Eric Dale (Stanley Tucci), the disturbing reality of what his work entails hits home in more ways than one. Caught in the impossible dilemma of saving either their already-embattled firm or the economy, he and his coworkers effectively come across as modern Greek gods, conscientiously measuring and juggling the fates of untold millions with barely any acknowledgment that they exist, all from the comfort of their steel-and-glass Olympus.

It is certainly an impressive pantheon that Chandor has assembled: Between Quinto’s wide-eyed Sullivan and his friend Seth (Penn Badgley), Paul Bettany’s pragmatic head trader Will Emerson acts as a cynical Hermes, mentoring his less experienced juniors and conveying bad news to both characters and viewers alike. Towering above them like a falsely benevolent Zeus is Jeremy Irons as CEO John Tuld, who expertly sugarcoats his self-serving greed with the bearing of a genial old uncle. Standing out as this colourful group’s voice of conscience is sales head Sam Rogers, through whom Kevin Spacey subverts the ruthless shark-toothed persona he built throughout his career playing similarly-positioned men with a weary and understated performance that blends in quietly until explicitly called upon to take the spotlight.

His performance, while not the film’s best (that honour belongs to Bettany), does a more consistent job of bringing a human face to the people behind the 2007-2008 financial crisis than most of the film does. Chandor displays a good eye for composition and colour that lends an almost dreamlike quality to the long night during which the world economy’s fate is sealed. The particular emphasis he places on the blue screens and dark shadows that permeate the firm’s offices is so efficient it almost distracts from the uneven staging and editing, the latter of which is particularly disconcerting during the many dialogue scenes. Often the shots answer each other with a drab monotony that undermines the dialogue’s electric potential, and rarely engage with the environment in any meaningful way. Half the time, it looks more like an exceptionally well-lit and well-acted (save a typically wooden Demi Moore) TV movie with occasional cinematic flourishes, the best being a montage during which soundbites of Emerson knowingly selling junk to unsuspecting buyers is played over sped-up footage of busy trading offices interspersed with exterior shots of New York City.

This disappointing lack of kinesis undermines Margin Call’s moments of human insight, best exemplified when Dale movingly contrasts idealized capitalist philanthropy with the system’s reality by wistfully recalling a bridge he helped build and the estimated thousands of years of life its users saved from being “wasted in a fucking car”. There are many such monologues and speeches scattered across the film in which each character defends their conception of capitalism and finance. Unfortunately, their written qualities only further expose the film’s visual shortcomings. Chandor, the son of an investment banker, knows how to convey the situation’s direness without dumbing anything down, but his style lacks the necessary spark to truly share his insider’s gaze with his audience. We remain, despite occasional breakthroughs, stuck on the other side of the shop’s window, watching helplessly as owners stab customers and each other in the back with varying degrees of consent.

"The Martian"

Ridley Scott’s career has been a long, bumpy and sometimes frustrating one, continually demonstrating firm discipline worthy of such master artisans as Michael Curtiz or Robert Wise but rarely tuning it to the consistent personal vision achieved by artists like John Ford or David Lean. A classical yet versatile filmmaker, Scott reaches greatness in sporadic bursts, like a cinematic Halley’s Comet that would otherwise be visible only through a telescope.

The Martian is one of the comet's brightest appearances. Not great so much as exceptional in its balance of craftsmanship and heart, it surpasses above-average crowd-pleasing fare like Apollo 13 by making its own impeccable show of remarkable expertise across the board – acting, direction, cinematography, editing, score – a note-perfect reflection of the solidary ingenuity displayed by the screenplay’s characters. That sounds ridiculously self-evident; of course the entire cast and crew need to be on their A-game for the movie to work, otherwise why even bother? Thing is, inventiveness, competence and teamwork are at the forefront of the story’s main themes. In the hands of a competent but mostly unimaginative director like Ron Howard, these themes are illustrated to produce agreeable sentiment. In the hands of someone like Ridley Scott on the top of his form, these ideas become part of the film’s formal and dramatic structure, and function as its very lifeblood, the electricity that keeps its pace steady and regular.

It says something about easy melodrama’s hold on modern visual storytelling when it is noteworthy that characters that are experienced scientists react to occupational hazards and unexpected setbacks with professional self-control¹. When a violent dust storm causes botanist Mark Watney (a never-better Matt Damon) to get knocked out of sight by a satellite dish during an emergency planetary evacuation, the expected last-ditch attempt to find him despite warnings of its futility takes place but without the requisite screaming and bickering. They know he is most likely dead and that circumstances cannot permit them to risk any more lives. All the shock, regret and self-blame is expressed by the actors’ faces and bodies. Likewise, the rescue operations that take place on Earth upon news of his survival keep conventional interpersonal drama to a minimum.

Not that The Martian diverges from mainstream storytelling and dramatic techniques by any means; it simply works harmoniously with its characters to make those techniques matter. There is not a minute of screen-time that does not fill its clearly-defined purpose, not one scene that lasts longer or shorter than it should, and yet the film manages to be more than a simple well-oiled machine. Characters are given enough space within their parameters to rise above their functions and archetypes without disrupting the balance. Watney himself matches his Boy Scout resourcefulness with self-deprecating humour that, in one of Drew Goddard’s screenplay’s more astute touches, is conveyed mostly through video logs ostensibly recorded for whichever rescue team ends up finding him in case of failure. Its true narrative purpose – to explain his actions to the audience and keep them informed on his state of mind – is a refreshing and justified take on the hackneyed old voiceover narration trope that never feels forced, yet unfortunately resists fully exploring the struggle against loneliness that this constant self-accounting implies.

Indeed, the futuristic Robinson Crusoe setting could have provided ample ground to examine our current digital generation’s impulse to monitor and report our every emotion and activity, but The Martian only scratches the surface, choosing instead to lionize science and technology as forces of unity with impressive parallel montages and match-cuts between NASA, Watney and the rest of his expedition, though the resulting connections don’t feel as deep as they did in Interstellar.

What ground Goddard’s screenplay does cover in the e-communication terrain, however, skillfully illuminates modern-day science geek culture: Using sometimes profane humour to neutralize or divert the painful and scary nature of his situations as well as make his scientific work approachable in spite of the technobabble, Watney is the kind of scientist you could very well picture as a Cracked contributor. More than simple American action hero glibness, his attitude evidences the underlying fear most heroes only hint at by bringing it to a more familiar level. This is where Matt Damon’s everyman persona – slightly overshadowed as of late by his off-screen outspokenness – truly shines; a naturally earnest actor, he delivers laughs whose unhappy roots only make them more potent. Think of his famous “Alice Jardine” monologue in Saving Private Ryan, stretched, diced and scattered across two hours of film. Only an actor of his heart-on-sleeve candor could excavate so deeply into such seemingly self-explanatory humour.

In a way, the aesthetic and storytelling choices found in The Martian constitute a response to the implicit paeans to rugged agnostic individualism of such films as 127 Hours, Captain Phillips and Gravity. To the up-close-and-personal realism and acoustic invasiveness that dominate the current trend of survival cinema, Ridley Scott replies with bright colours, inclusive framing and – one of the film’s most delightful surprises – a disco soundtrack. Even Mars itself is filmed with wide sweeping landscape pans and shots that emphasize grandeur and majesty rather than hostility and isolation.

All of these choices beautifully underline the script’s optimistic emphasis on teamwork – teamwork that briefly but noticeably includes God, both in symbolic and referential form (“We’ll take all the help we can get” says Sean Bean’s flight director to Chiwetel Ejiofor’s multi-religious mission director). In doing so, Scott and Goddard also subvert the solipsistic temptation inherent in both the survival subgenre and the use of video logs as a narrative device.

Although this ongoing theme of cooperation is slightly undermined by China’s late entry to the rescue via an uncharacteristically lazy setup – two leading Chinese scientists decide to intervene upon seeing news of one of NASA’s setbacks on TV – that fails to translate blatant market pandering to natural plot development, any suspicious aftertaste is offset by the script’s subsequent compromise of having nerdy young astrodynamicist Rich Purnell (a scene-stealing Donald Glover) come up with the plan that brings about the climax.

Directed with savoir-faire acquired from years of experience, written with unaffected passion for both the science and its characters, and supported by a dynamic cast, The Martian marks one of Ridley Scott’s highlights and a welcome addition to what might become a science-fiction resurgence.

¹Even the excellent Gravity was criticized for what many understandably perceived to be Dr. Stone’s excessive lack of calm and need for reassurance.