My blog reviews movies as political, historical or social commentary with intentional disregard for their artistic or cinematic value. One foe of American political scientists and economists is that they ignore movies as sources to inform them on changes in American culture, view exoticism as a hallmark of "foreigness" and, at the same time, impart American values and judgment to foreign movies.
Saturday, October 10, 2015
Ridley Scott, The Martian
The creators, unlike Interstellar and Gravity, carefully avoided illogical twists. All the stretching of technical/physical/biological facts has been performed accurately, without obvious violence done to the plot or elementary logic.
Yet, the author(s) forgot that all movies (or novels, for that matter) is about human conflict. It takes an enormous talent and ingenuity to infuse one-man show with the conflict sufficient to drive complex narrative, such as in the "Life of Pi." A few well-designed jokes as in "Martian" are not enough. While Matt Damon and Jessica Chastain are forever wed to sci-fi, another master actors such as Jeff Daniels, Sean Bean and, especially, Kirsten Wiig are being lost as the screen savers with little characterization. In these stock roles it would work better to cast relatively unknown, aspiring starlets such as McKenzie Davis ("Mindy Park").
P.S. Compare descriptions at http://mars2044.blogspot.com/
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For my half-scientific, half-artistic sketches of a future manned mission to Mars and the discussions, you might visit my other blog: http://mars2044.blogspot.com/
ReplyDeleteYou can also spot (hopefully, random) coincidence of many of a detail with current renderings of Mars expedition. I was there first!