Martian

Year: 2015

Grade: B+

Country: USA

Director: Scott

Review

don’t get to watch many movies in the theater so we have to pick wisely nowadays. this is a great film so we go lucky. the things that inspired me most were probably the collective nature of everyone pulling together to solve a common problem and the fact that they actually did it instead of dealing with the usual incompetence and hemming and hawing that seems to be so pervasive in society today. this wasn’t the unrolling of obamacare or the building of the bay bridge. this was more like the manhattan project where we needed to get shit done or the nazis would take over the world. it felt big and important like that and they got it done which is a wonder to see; sad as that may be.

of course, damon and others did a great job and scott’s direction was great. the balance between comedy and drama was great and moved the 2+ hour long film along pretty well.

nowadays movies are marketing to a chinese audience and so they feature more chinese characters and are less likely to have the chinese as enemies. in this one we have a critical engineer who is chinese and the chinese save the day by providing us with one of their rockets after ours fails. i think it’s more likely that the russians would have this technology than the chinese, but whatever. it felt like a pretty obvious play to the chinese audience, but i’m okay with it.

Watched in theater