127 Hours

Written at the time of the film's release...

As I recall, the Best Picture winner for that year was The King's Speech (the nominees were quite impressive that year), although 127 Hours and Franco's performance were nominated.

"Drinking Your Own Epiphany"

or
"Rock On/('Ooops')/Arm(our) Off"

The story of Aron Ralston, extreme....everything, who, on a solo trek through Canyonlands National Park in Utah finds himself stuck in a seam of the Earth pinned down by a boulder he has no way of moving, is a harrowing story of survival, self-reliance and an ultimate example of "a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do."* Beyond the gruesome headlines is the story of a young man, who, faced with a situation;putting him, literally and figuratively "between a rock and a hard place" (the title of his book outlining the story), chose to follow his philosophy to an extreme act, losing a part of himself, but gaining far, far more.

Not your typical film subject. In fact, it would be a daunting thing to film, not only from a technical aspect—limited staging, convincing illusions of the injury—but from a dramatic one, as well (we're talking one-man show in a cave).

Danny Boyle's film of the incident, though, 127 Hours, not only makes the film seem invisibly easy to accomplish—one doesn't think for a moment of the filming difficulties, so engrossed are you in the challenges of the film-Ralston in his tasks trying to extricate himself and survive, basically—it is an intense, kaleidoscopic presentation of a human psyche in solitary duress. Ralston (James Franco) fights the battle on two fronts: physically, dealing with his limited options and the practical, and impractical, tools at his disposal; and mentally, as he struggles with the mental challenges of time, pain and personality. With only 15 minutes of sunlight each day, which he finds the capacity to luxuriate through, he keeps a running countdown of resources, limited food and water, the tools at his command and his own diminished capacity. He knows his time and options are limited, and gradually, as they run out—that poster embedded here suggests, very appropriately, an hour-glass—he must come to grips with his responsibility to himself, and the people in his life that, heretofore, have been merely fleeting encounters, as jettisonable as the wrapper of his last Power bar.

Time wounds all heels. And in his forced imprisonment, the taking stock of Aron Ralston brings focus and clarity. The hyper-activity of Ralston's previous life, which Boyle crams into a split-screen multi-speed, multi-media format, is stilled, brought to a very narrow range of existence, and places him in the Here and Now, as opposed to the Next Empty Thing. Time and relationships become essentials, and his own self, literally and metaphorically, becomes disposable. He discards, mentally, physically, what has become useless.

And chooses life. 

Wow. Great story. "Intense" (as one Grand Cinema patron remarked leaving the theater gasped) and harrowing.

Don't let the amputation aspects of the film turn you off to a great film experience. Yes, it's graphic (Boyle prepares you for it with early attempts that do nothing to solve the situation—they're more exploratory surgeries), yes, there will be blood...and sinew and gristle...and nerve-slicing—which Boyle and his sound-designers amp up with a dentist-drill irritation—but, nothing that hasn't been CSI'd into our consciousness to the point of numbness. By this time, the identification with Ralston has become so empathetic, that I (perversely, I guess) found the episode liberating, and an act to be cheered.

Boyle's quilting of the movie is brilliant, but he's aided and abetted by an army of technicians who keep things fascinating, not the least of which are cinematographers Enrique Chediak and Anthony Dod Mantle, and Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire composer A.R. Rahman (and a goofily eclectic soundtrack).

But the hero is Franco. After seeming a bit of a "meh" actor in the first Spiderman movie, it has been fun to watch him grow as an actor, first in that series, and in the clutch of carefully chosen dramas and comedies he has made since. Boyle has set a fine table, but Franco is the center-piece, the one essential ingredient that had to "work" to pull it all together. This is a sure Oscar-nominated performance, and, if there's any justice, he'll get the statuette, as well.

Oscar-wise, Boyle might even pull a "two-fer." We're on the cusp of December and the Christmas movie crush, but it is not hard to imagine 127 Hours turning out to be the best movie of the year.

Aron Ralston.  Rock On.

* I still remember where I was and what I was doing when I first heard the news reports of his story and what he did. I also recall my reaction, which consisted of taking a deity's name in vain, and contemplating—for several minutes—what I would have done in that situation. I could conjure no definitive answer except "Maybe...but certainly not as well."

The Martian (2015)

Robinson Crusoe on Mars (the Reboot)
or
"I'm Going to 'Science' the Shit Out of This"

Matt Damon is marooned on an alien planet for his second film in a row in The Martian (based on the best-seller by Andy Weir) and directed by Ridley Scott. And, as befitting castaway movies, an efficient little movie it is, setting up the circumstances for the film in the first ten minutes as an astronaut on a Mars mission is left stranded on the angry red planet with no hope of rescue for at least four years. There's no hope that his crew can come back and get him because in space, no one can hear you say "Can we turn this bus around?" And even if you could, space mechanics (despite Star's Wars and Trek) and Newtonian physics would prevent you unless a significant body with significant gravity could help you turn your bee-line into a 180.

Like its themic progenitor Robinson Crusoe on Mars (which trumpeted on its posters "This film is scientifically authentic...it is only one step ahead of current reality!"), the film is only a few years from what is possible, given political and budgetary will.  There are scientific lapses—the gravity is wrong, for one thing, people walk with the same gait as they do on Earth, objects fall with the weight of Earth gravity, not the roughly 1/3 gravity as would be experienced on Mars (by contrast the moon has half of that—1/6th—so Mars walking would be less galumphy than on our satellite, but still less oppressive than Earth). It just goes to show the moon-landing deniers that, even with the sophisticated special effects of today, it would still be damned difficult to fake something that would pass photographic scrutiny (if they had a mind to accept it).

The crew of the Ares abandons ship and one astronaut...in a dust-storm.

But, back to the movie...there's no getting around it that unless his buddies can get around something, Damon's character, Mark Watney, space botanist, is going to have a long wait, so he decides to hunker down and find a way to have enough oxygen, enough water, enough pressure, enough food, and some form of communication for four long years before he can get off the rock...and he'll have to make an endurance-testing planet trip in order to get to that next landing site. As he puts it, he's going to have to "science the shit out of it" if he is going to survive the long wait.

"So that's why they called it 'Lonely Planet'..."

To the crew of the homeward-bound Ares III and NASA, Watney is dead, killed by a careening communications dish that goes off its bearings in a Mars-storm. That same accident cuts off all communications with Earth from the surface, so Watney is essentially marooned without help or aid. He takes stock—the mission was cut short and it was a mission for six—and sets up a rationing schedule for how long he can make the meals last and comes to the conclusion quickly that he's going to run out of food if he's there for as long as he suspects, given the next landing. So, as he relates in his running log—probably the worst viewed YouTube channel in history—he decides that he's going to re-purpose part of his "HAB Alone" into a greenhouse in order to grow potatoes. He's a botanist, for crying out loud, and, as one of his crew-mates (the now ubiquitous Michael Peña puts it) "it's not science."

How he does so is so damned clever that you're willing to go along with Watney no matter what lame-brained scheme he may come up with along the way. He walls off a large section of the HAB enclosing it in plastic creating a greenhouse. He goes out and digs a considerable amount of Martian soil (which can't grow anything), fertilizes it with the freeze-dried waste of his fellow astronauts and sets up a reliably wet, tepid atmosphere for hydration by taking oxygen (which he has) and hydrogen (which he has) and burning it (which he can, verrry carefully) to create water, nearly blowing himself up in the process.

But the fundamentals work. Soon he has a crop of burgeoning potato plants that, if he doesn't binge, will get him to the next landing time. Good enough. Now, he sets himself up with two more problems: communication, and outfitting his rover for an extended journey which he will eventually have to take to get him to a landing spot 400 kilometers away—a distance far beyond the rover's battery life or environmental systems. Fortunately, there's some stuff he might be able to use.

Meanwhile, back on Earth, they're starting to notice something. There's an orbiter circling Mars taking shots of the Martian surface, and the wonks at Mission Control are starting to notice something peculiar. The crew has abandoned the Ares habitation module and there's supposedly no one left alive. So, who's moving things around? Why has the rover shifted position from one series of shots to another after the Ares has taken off? In lieu of shy "driver's permit"-carrying creatures that the cameras and instruments haven't detected yet, there comes the immediate suspicion that the announced-dead Watney may have survived. Inconvenient, as they've already had the funeral. "Uh, remember that astronaut we left for dead on Mars? Well, we were half right when we told you that. We left him, but he isn't dead. Our bad."

As Watney puts it on his video log: "Sur-priiise!"

It's at this point that the usually dour Ridley Scott has his moment to be the curmudgeon that he usually is. A wonk (Mackenzie Davis) sees the shifts, reports it to Mission Director Vincent Kapoor (Kapoor? He's played by Chiwetel Ejiofor!*), who then reports it to NASA Director Ted Sanders (Jeff Daniels) and Annie Montrose (Kristen Wiig), Director of Media Relations, who say "It took so long to take it up the chain of command, he's dead by now!" Well, no, they don't say that, they say "Don't let this get out. Don't tell the crew. Don't tell anybody until we're sure of our facts" which is NASA-speak for "we don't have a plan in place or a budget for bringing him back, so in our eyes, he's still as dead as Schrödinger's cat!" See how up-to-date the science is? Watney could be perceived as either living or dead without a government grant! Take that, Interstellar! Now that's REAL theoretical science!

Meanwhile, back at the HAB, Watney is operating without a budget. He's appropriated batteries, augmented them with solar collectors, and a nicely warm nuclear generator as an independent heater and has managed to make the rover a longer-range vehicle that can be recharged during the day and operated at night and more importantly, be livable day or night. Good thing he came up with that idea first because his next goal—communication—will take a little trip to borrow some radio equipment from a not-too-next-door neighbor.

He's heading for the closest Mars Rover, which ran out of battery power many years before and whose home-base, Pathfinder, used to send back all its selfies to Earth. Well, with brand new batteries and a Swiftering of its solar panels, Watney sets up a little audio-visual show for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, if they happen to figure out what that spurious signal is being generated out of Mars. After all, it's been awhile since Pathfinder had something to write home about. Now, it says "there goes the neighborhood."

When Kapoor and company see his tire tracks leaving his habitat, they start wondering where he's going. A quick look at a map of Earth things on Mars show he's heading in the direction of Pathfinder and so, without telling NASA, Kapoor flies out to JPL in Pasadena and says "Ya know, that Pathfinder you've been ignoring for a decade? You might want to take a look..."

Very clever stuff. The sort of "necessity-is-a-mother" thing that's been intriguing since Robinson Crusoe and before to when you start thinking about how things were invented in the first place with just the things available at the time. Things like "duct tape"...

The whole movie has that "ya gotta do what ya gotta do" sort of feel that permeates all aspects of the story and gives it a bit of rebelliousness to it that tosses out the game plan and improvises no matter what anyone else says. That goes down to the story-telling, too, so much of which is done visually, aided and abetted by Damon's journals as the driving force, which, thankfully, is short on drama and awash with self-effacing humor (one of my favorites: "Seven days ago, I ran out of ketchup.") that still manages to make note of the uniqueness of the situation and its inconveniences. One of the running gripes Watney has is the library of music that the Commander of the mission (Jessica Chastain) has left him with, which consists solely of disco music. Thankfully, we're spared "Stayin' Alive" by The Bee-Gees (that's owned by Paramount and this is Fox), but the final credits song could not be more appropriately chosen.

The Martian is also, given director Scott, mercifully short of hardware-fetish (although it is there and taken for granted that we know about artificial gravity and such) and remains solidly "can-do/make-do" in spirit. The performances are uniformly terrific, given their scope, although Damon commands the thing in a "one-man show" performance. It is relentlessly entertaining, in a way that is uncommon in most Ridley Scott movies. Scott always seems to want to find the dark cloud in the silver lining and rub your nose in it. Here, his touch is light, but with echoes of past films in framing and ideas. We spend less time outside of ships and buildings watching them dance or evoke an image and more time inside with the crew. We're not distanced from the drama by set design or bleak pauses of recuperative silence. In this story, time and resources are of the essence, and Scott wastes little of it on indulgences. It's all for plot and character, rather than point.

The Martian is such a fun film to watch and is such an efficient entertainment, it made me suspicious. I wasn't sure exactly of what, other than there was no agenda from the director other than making as spare and bare-bones a film as he could. He wasn't trying to "out-Kubrick" Kubrick or throw some arbitrary ambiguity into the mix to give it some tonal frisson. There's no impractical schmutz in the air (except where it IS practical) or anything else to filter what is essentially a story about survival at its most essential. Could Ridley Scott have seen the story as a simple story of life or death and merely allowed it to "let it be?" I LIKE this no-nonsense Ridley Scott. I hope to see more of him.

In back: Chastain, Hennie, and Damon
In front: Stan, Mara, and Peña (the Marvel kids)

Fantastic 4

"It's CLOBBERIN' Time!"
or 
"This Movie!...This Monster!"

The latest Marvel superhero movie to come out is the third attempt to make a viable tent-pole of one of the comics line's most venerable titles—the first to be published by Marvel, The Fantastic Four. Four friends who, on a space mission, are turned into super-heroes by a bombardment of radiation, the four—"Mr. Fantastic" (Reed Richards), who can stretch, "The Invisible Woman" (Sue Storm) who can turn invisible, "The Human Torch" (Sue's brother Johnny), who turns into a flying human fire-ball, and "The Thing" (Ben Grimm), who is turned into a super-strong rock-like bi-ped. Together, "they fight crime" (as the cliche goes), but for this relatively human team, the challenges were more cosmic and more mind-bending as they had to contend with threats from other galaxies and other dimensions (drawn from the seemingly endless imaginative ink-well of Jack "The King" Kirby), while, at the same time, serving up the mandatory Marvel "soap opera" quotient with Reed and Sue's love story, Johnny's hipster hot-head, and Grimm's impenetrable angst over being an unlovable freak. With its combination of mind-blowing themes and (*choke*) tear-duct-blowing melodrama, it became a big hit with teens and the college-crowd.

Reed, Sue, Johnny and Ben as rendered by Jack Kirby

It was self-trumpeted (a bit prematurely on the cover of issue #4) as "The World's Greatest Comic Magazine!" but the appeal of the FF couldn't be denied. Attempts were made in 1994 (under the producing of Roger Corman and is the ONLY film in his low-budget exploitation career that was NEVER released) and revived again in 2005 (with Jessica Alba, Michael Chiklis and a flaming Chris Evans, as well as the guy who got crushed by a container on the Golden Gate Bridge in San Andreas) in two films (Fantastic Four and Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer) that were a bit premature in the new wave of CGI mounted comic-book films. Those two FF movies are consigned to "The Zero Zone," along with Ben Affleck's Daredevil movie.

The 90's FF (Hyde-White, Staab, Underwood and Smith) and the 00's FF (Alba, Gruffud, Evans and Chiklis)

But, it seems there must be a "Fantastic Four" movie attempted every decade from now on. The latest, Fantastic 4, is no improvement on the others. The cast is younger, more diverse (despite fan-boy grumbling—the most conservative of critics), the effects improved, and an attempt has been made to update the story and make it more hi-tech for the 21st century. That it ultimately fails leads one to question if it's one of those properties that just doesn't work in any other medium than the four-color comic. Or it makes one question if any other studio than one working in tandem with Marvel can produce anything decent. The director of this one, Josh Trank (who made the interesting Chronicle) has gone public, grousing that studio interference messed up his vision of Lee and Kirby's vision.

The origin story does need some updating, however, now that we're out of the 1960's of the Four's re-birth and into the 21st century. Instead of doing some experimental space-travel, the four and their co-worker Victor Von Doom (an eye-rolling name that, if anything needed to be changed, should have been a priority), instead, are exploring matter transference—a working "transporter" being a dream project of Richards' (in this case, Miles Teller) since he was a boy. At a science fair where he demonstrates a break-through, he's invited by Dr. Franklin Storm (Reg E. Cathey, in a performance that is quite...well, "restrained" would be a nice way of putting it) to join a team involving his son Johnny (Michael B. Jordan), adopted daughter Sue (Kate Mara), and banished upstart Von Doom (Toby Kebbel) to see the project through to completion. But before a NASA administrator (Tim Blake Nelson) can start trials, Reed, Johnny, Victor and Reed's boy-hood chum Ben Grimm (Jamie Bell—remember him as Tintin in Steven Spielberg's film?  Of course you don't—you won't remember him in this, either, as his part is mostly motion-capture) who's there for some inexplicable reason, decide they're going to test it on themselves first. The mission does not go well, affecting the travelers in variant and horrific ways—it also alters Sue Storm, who is left back at the control room for some reason, but suffers the consequences, anyway.

Sue, Johnny, Dr. Storm and "Vic" von Doom.

Von Doom is left on the "Zero Planet" (as it's called), while Reed's body is turned malleable, Johnny erupts in flames, Sue turns invisible, and Ben is changed into a rock-like monster. It is horrific for all, but the NASA suits see them as an opportunity for weaponization (after some experimentation), but Reed slithers out of his shackles and escapes the complex they're being held in against their will, vowing he will free the others and turn them back to normal. For those left behind, Reed is simply a turncoat and to the government he's a threat. This takes a good hour to set up and less than that to resolve, including a return to the Hell-Planet, where the four confront Von Doom who is constructing one of those Marvel movie things that throw off an energy stream that shoots up into the sky, but you have no idea why.*

A lot of it looks good—there's a subdued color palette and a tendency to dimly light things that give it the look of a good old fashioned horror movie, which when you have people disappearing, disfigured and on fire isn't much of a stretch (hey, I just described everybody's powers in one sentence!). But, there is an awful lot wrong with it. One could nit-pick over dialogue and acting and failures in logic and potential throughout this movie. But, simply put, there are four key errors in this Fantastic 4 that makes it unique among bad super-hero movies.

1.  Consider the Source: The Fantastic 4 are superheroes at their most puerile, designed to impose a family structure on disaffected little boys. They are instantly recognizable as Mom and Dad (Reed and Sue) and the bickering kids (Ben and Johnny). Whatever conflicts they go through (and they go through a lot internally and externally), the family dynamic pulls them through. That's one thing that's consistent about the Fantastic Four and part of its basic DNA. In this film, however, "family" is given lip service. The group is quarantined after the accident and restrained by the NASA industrialists and the four turn into factions—Johnny and Sue against Ben and everybody against Reed, "the turncoat," who has escaped and seemingly abandoned the other three. Nobody trusts anybody and its every man and woman for themselves until Dr. Doom (Bwa-ha-HA!) serves as an over-arching threat that unites them. Up until the last few minutes of the film, they're not even a team at all and are actually pissed at each other. This is so fundamentally opposed to the appeal of the original concept, it may be the biggest mistake of the film. If you're going to make a superhero film about a creation that's 55 years old, at least realize what it is that's made it last so long.

2. Did You Know That You're My Hero?: That's the thing about super-heroes. They are us but better. Smarter, faster, stronger, and certainly more altruistic to the point where the whole genre might be considered science-fiction, given the proclivities of the populace. They train themselves to make use of their gifts in the service of others, and if something should befall them—a spider-bite, a lightning strike, or a birthright—they seek its use for the betterment of their neighbors. Sure, the Fantastic Four may have turned into embodiments of the four elements: Earth, Air, Fire and..Rubber, but rather than grieving, drinking and saying "how do I fix this?" they use their new handicaps, and in that very tendency they are heroes. That's not what you get here. You don't get heroes, you get victims. The explosion of the transporter makes everybody helpless and easy prey for the militarists hoping to exploit the four by "helping" them. And Reed is so beset by guilt, he wants to "fix it."** So he runs away to become a super-genius Ted Kaczynski in the woods. The victimization of the Fantastic Four here aligns them with most of the other Marvel heroes—and not just the Marvels, but others of the sub-genus—making the origins part and parcel of the cause they fight for. But that was never the Fantastic Four in the comics. There was not too much brooding to be done over their conditions (except for Ben), not when there were whatzit's to invent and cosmic crises to insert themselves into. The 4, for the most part, accepted what happened and moved on, making the most of the situation.  It would be nice to see more of that.

3. Sometimes Origin Stories Don't Matter: The origin of The Fantastic Four is completely unremarkable and gives no purpose to their being—an accident that changes them and inspires them to make lemonade out of lemons. In the comics, they are all gifted in some way (even Ben Grimm is a test-pilot, which is why he's on board the doomed space-ship) and their instincts are to use those gifts for some greater purpose. That origin does not make a mission—to find the person responsible, to prevent the same thing from happening to others or such. And yet the "How-They-Came-To-Be" story is trotted out like that's the thing to do. Unfortunately, that story (which provides no "hook" to a franchise) takes up more than half the movie, time that could have been better spent on anything else. Like story or character or "Something Big." It would have been far better to start in media res—assume the group simply is and concentrate on something world-shaking that they have to overcome. As it is, the movie is extraordinarily lop-sided, the majority of it being Origin Story followed by 15 Minutes of Action, and rather negligible action at that. Really, all they do at the end is beat Dr. Doom up and turn his "Whatever-It-Is" against him. If you're going to make a superhero movie...

4. Make it ABOUT Something, Damn It!:  There isn't much of a story here besides the origin, a quick confrontation with the motivation-less villain, and then the movie ends without the group having a purpose...merely a headquarters. Maybe that's to make the whole thing seem more in line with The Avengers, but that group has a goal before they decide to move in together, and without that there is certainly no triumph to the ending, merely a mortgage. There is no reason for the team to exist. They beat up Dr. Doom and that's it. What's the point to continuing the series—to find a cure for the mutations, to perfect the errant experiment that caused them, to block it from happening again (as it appears to be a bad place), to establish a support group for Zero Planet victims—what's the job? Hopefully, that HQ has a meeting room with a white-board or something so they can figure it out before the next movie (despite the poor box-office, Fox is already talking one up...for now).

In the end, it's all false advertising—it's not the comics and only resembles it in name and powers—and right down to the name: Not so fantastic.  And if you're into rating movies, only 1 out of 4. 

Reed Richards can make himself look like anything with that stretch-power.
So why does he choose to look so dumpy?

* Marvel Comics was always soft on science—there always seemed to be a scene where the four were looking up at some huge cosmic something-or-other with dialogue that summarized "I don't know what it is, but it sure is BIG!" 

The Marvel movie equivalent seems to be "I don't know what it does, but it sure spits out a lot of sparks!"

"I don't know what it is, but it sure is BIG!"

** Reed does want to help Ben Grimm in the comics, as that character is his friend and the most traumatized by the "accident." Everybody else is fine with their powers and set about how to use them and improving them.