In any Tim Hortons coffee shop you step into – and, trust me, there are plenty from which to choose – Toronto worldwide Film Festival is the topic du jour, and not just the star sightings and celebrity buzz, but the films themselves. And all this before lunchtime! Director Ridley Scott assured of a very different movie from “Interstellar“. If everybody says it won’t work, screw them, just go out and do it. – Sir Patrick Stewart as the local neo-Nazi majordomo.
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“I think the most hard part was the suits”, Mara, who plays an astronaut in the movie, told JD Heyman. Saulnier has a knack for pushing a situation to its breaking point with finesse and then blowing it all to hell with violence depicted in ways you hadn’t thought possible – so it hurts, in other words. We just have to hope there’s more going on here than what you might find at your average American porn site. For this new film, he took a massive and diverse cast with him.
20th Century Fox and Under Armour have released a new “in-world” video for The Martian, which shows Matt Damon’s Astronaut Mark Watney training for his mission to Mars. At all. The script itself has 70 pages in-details from NASA.
It’s nice to see a movie with no villain, where the protagonists genuinely like each other, and where people are good at their jobs. Watney hates the “Happy Days” reruns he finds on his fellow astronauts’ computers, but that doesn’t stop him from watching them and from dropping an unbelievable reference to them later on. But The Martian makes an argument for NASA and space travel as a productive investment in the human intellect, rather than a star-gazing indulgence in the federal budget.
Mark’s experiences on Mars – which are stunningly visualized by cinematographer Dariusz Wolski and an army of visual effects artists – are cross-cut with the efforts of the NASA administrators and scientists back on Earth who are trying to rescue him.
My God, who’s not in this movie?
Glover, who plays astrodynamicist Rich Purnell, shares the scene with Jeff Daniels, Kristen Wiig, Chiwetel Ejiofor and Sean Bean as he animatedly explains a slingshot trajectory that could return the Hermes spacecraft and the Ares 3 crew to Mars.
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Working from an aggressively smart and amusing screenplay by Drew Goddard, adapted from the also smart and amusing book by Andy Weir, “The Martian” is so confident, so relaxed, and so completely sure-footed that it nearly looks effortless. The back half pumps up the melodramatic hokum, with dramatic developments telegraphed in advance and a few too many Big Speeches and Stinging Retorts. It was simpler to relate to Chuck Noland because it was easy to put ourselves in his shoes and probably make a lot of the same mistakes. It’s not enough that Mark has the will to survive, which is something that all action heroes in Hollywood share; this is a movie that values expertise and creative thinking without losing any thrills in the process. The rest of the crew on Earth presumes that he is dead.
