Film Review: The Martian (2015)

Mark Watney (Matt Damon) is a very smart man in a very bad situation. A member of a manned mission to Mars, he was struck by a piece of debris during a storm which separated him from the rest of his crew. Believing that Watney had been killed, and faced with the agonising choice between leaving him or being stranded themselves, his crew left and started their long, mournful journey back to Earth. Fortunately, Watney survived. Unfortunately, he's alone on Mars with limited supplies, no way of contacting his crew or NASA, and no means of escape. Faced with the prospect of a long stay on a dead planet, with eventual starvation the most likely outcome, Watney would be forgiven for giving in to despair. Instead, he becomes a regular Robinson Crusoe on Mars (though not the actual Robinson Crusoe on Mars) and uses the tools at hand and his scientific know-how to try and survive, no matter how much the odds are stacked against him.

Things I Learned From Movie X: Prometheus

"How do I get out of this movie and back to Earth?"

I've been fairly vocal about how much I dislike Prometheus in the past, but try as I might to walk away, I still have much more to say on the matter, as well as on Ridley Scott's career in general. Fortunately, Things I Learned From Movie X remains the perfect venue for me to vent, and it's especially suited to a film like Prometheus, which I like so very much in some ways and dislike so very much in others.

Film Review: Prometheus (2012)

 

In 2089, Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) and Charlie Holloway (Logan Marshall-Green) discover cave paintings on an archaeological dig that match similar ones found around the world, all of which seem to depict giant figures pointing at the a specific star system. A few years later, Shaw and Holloway are part of an expedition aboard the spaceship Prometheus, on a mission funded by Peter Weyland (Guy Pearce, in distressingly awful old-man make-up) to that same star system, and although the expedition was predicated on their theory that the paintings are an invitation from creatures that may have created humanity, they are informed by Meredith Vickers (Charlize Theron) that the expedition is a commercial venture, rather than a scientific one. Once they arrive at their destination, the nature of the mission quickly falls by the wayside as it becomes apparent that things are not as they appear.

You Can't Go Home Again: Why Ridley Scott shouldn't direct the Blade Runner sequel

Following the announcement last week that a Blade Runner sequel is in the works, with Ridley Scott signed on to direct, there has been much ballyhooing about whether or not a Blade Runner sequel is a good idea, or even necessary, because this is the Internet, and if we didn't ballyhoo then we wouldn't know what to do. (If you want to read some discussion of the film that doesn't constitute ballyhooing, my friend Rory wrote a very good blog post about the potential that the world of Blade Runner has for further stories.) Leaving aside the fact that the sequel probably won't start shooting for another two years, during which time the whole thing could easily fall apart, or that Scott currently has a very long list of films that he is attached to direct that haven't yet come to fruition (like that Monopoly movie that has been "in development" for so long it feels more like a weird collective dream than a real thing at this point) before we see Blade Runner 2: Blade Runner-er, I think to dismiss the very idea of a follow-up out of hand is a little hasty. Prudent, but hasty.