{"id":1695,"date":"2015-10-09T21:43:39","date_gmt":"2015-10-10T05:43:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wou.edu\/westernjournal\/?p=1695"},"modified":"2015-10-09T21:43:39","modified_gmt":"2015-10-10T05:43:39","slug":"lost-in-space-and-loving-it-the-martian-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wou.edu\/westernhowl\/lost-in-space-and-loving-it-the-martian-review\/","title":{"rendered":"Lost in space and loving it: \u201cThe Martian\u201d review"},"content":{"rendered":"
By: Declan Hertel \r\nEntertainment Editor<\/pre>\n
With the recent discovery of liquid water on Mars, the Red Planet seems closer than ever.
\nThis seemingly simple but massively important discovery got me all fired up to see \u201cThe Martian,\u201d the latest film from Ridley Scott whose other works include \u201cAlien,\u201d and \u201cBlade Runner.\u201d <\/p>\n
A new movie about Mars comes out just as we make a huge breakthrough in its exploration? It\u2019s hard to believe it wasn\u2019t planned.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Martian\u201d finds Matt Damon (\u201cThe Bourne Identity\u201d) playing Mark Watney, an astronaut accidentally left for dead on the surface of Mars after a storm prematurely ends the crew\u2019s mission. As he begins to create a one-man colony on the surface, NASA realizes he\u2019s alive and sets about bringing him home.<\/p>\n
I went into this movie expecting something like Alfonso Cuar\u00f3n\u2019s \u201cGravity\u201d (2013), where a single astronaut is stranded in space and everything\u2019s falling apart around the crew and \u201coh god, oh god\u201d the empty vastness is so near \u201coh god.\u201d<\/p>\n
While there are moments of great tension (and what else could we expect from the man who made freaking \u201cAlien\u201d), they don\u2019t overwhelm. Instead, the brilliance of \u201cThe Martian\u201d lies in its bright tone: while it\u2019s always clear that the situation is dire and time is limited, the film just asks you to accept that and instead chooses to focus on just how supremely cool this whole thing is.<\/p>\n
Watney is always cracking jokes to his video journal and talking about how awesome it is that he\u2019s triumphing over a barren wasteland where it would only take one big mistake to kill him. He talks about technical definitions of colonization and what international laws space falls under, always to bring it back to \u201cEverything I do has never been done before. That is \u2018NUTS\u2019.\u201d <\/p>\n
Watching Watney\u2019s new home come together is a joy; we celebrate with every success and lament every failure with him. For a movie about a fairly hopeless situation, the film is very funny and lighthearted.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Martian\u201d also features a spectacular ensemble cast to complement Damon, with the likes of Jessica Chastain (\u201cZero Dark Thirty\u201d), Chiwetel Ejiofor (\u201c12 Years a Slave\u201d), and Sean Bean (\u201cGame of Thrones\u201d) making appearances. There is not a weak performance among the cast, each approaching the tasks ahead of them with the gravity they\u2019re due, but also with that sense of \u201cthis is so cool.\u201d<\/p>\n
Movies that center around the \u201ctriumph of the human spirit\u201d can very easily fall into superficial sentimentality that ends up dehumanizing the characters and cheapening the message, but not so with \u201cThe Martian.\u201d <\/p>\n
The dedication, enthusiasm, and sense of humor displayed by every character doesn\u2019t feel forced. It feels like the natural reaction to a situation that\u2019s totally unprecedented in terms of both danger and awesomeness.<\/p>\n
In fact, that\u2019s my takeaway from the movie: awesome. Humans are awesome, space is awesome, and the former can do awesome things in the latter despite great obstacles. Because we\u2019re humans. We can tame space. And that\u2019s awesome.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
With the recent discovery of liquid water on Mars, the Red Planet seems closer than ever. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":825,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1695","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-entertainment"],"modified_by":null,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wou.edu\/westernhowl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1695","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wou.edu\/westernhowl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wou.edu\/westernhowl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wou.edu\/westernhowl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/825"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wou.edu\/westernhowl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1695"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wou.edu\/westernhowl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1695\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wou.edu\/westernhowl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1695"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wou.edu\/westernhowl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1695"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wou.edu\/westernhowl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1695"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}