First of all, I've come to realize I don't like 3D movies. They were lame in the fifties when I saw '13 Ghosts' and they are lame now. The screen always looks dark...
(I wonder why)
...and, maybe, that spoiled some of The Martian fun for me. 3D is absolutely unnecessary to a film unless it's a film about throwing baseballs at the audience. It always looks like pop-up Christmas cards, with gratuitous shooting stars thrown in just so you can do the movie in 3D. There was no benefit - absolutely none - in shooting in 3D.
Stop it.
(Matt Damon. I love Matt Damon usually)
The humor - honestly? Really? There were some bravado jokes made by a man who believed he was doomed to die in space - but, we all knew he wasn't really. And then there was that whole "disco suck" running joke stuff. Y'all realize that that has been done before, right?
"You're music sucks, captain (or whatever Jessica Chastain was).
Female captain grins reluctantly while the others snigger.
So fresh.
Then there are some typical sterotypes:
The fun Latino crew member.
The no nonsense captain (Jessica Chastain - actually a nice change of pace there, to have a woman as captain).
The beautiful girl crew member whose job I never understood.
The handsome crew member boy she loves.
(Cat Women of The Moon - 1953)
The tough talking head of the space stuff - Jeff Daniels (who is doing the same character he does in The Newsroom, a show I enjoyed much more than this movie),
The obscure but brilliant, flip, antisocial, computer geek tech who solves the problem with a really simple solution He also treats the head of the space program (Daniels) with disinterest, as if he were just anyone, which bemuses the head of the space stuff.
(Interesting aside - usually the black team member gets killed during the mission. Luckily in this movie the guy was a geek, and on earth, so he survived. But I guarantee if he'd been in the space capsule, somehow he would have been toast. But I Digress...)
Mat Damon. Our boy in space, the brave, brilliant, cute as a button, humble, yada, yada, yada... (He really is cute as the dickens isn't he?)
Ok, the rest was kind of Gravity meets Apollo 13 (a much better movie) comprising hours and hours of the experiments to save Matt, the brilliant ideas that at first work, and then fail, one by one, periodically throughout the film... until...
The rescue itself. OK. There is this guy who is going to float outside the rescue capsule and grab Matt Damon as he flies by - BUT Jessica Chastain - the captain who feels soooo bad about leaving the poor schmuck up there in the first place - DEMANDS to be the one to catch him. As he flies by.
REALLY? Dear God in Heaven. If it were me, and my only chance at survival - a one in one billion chance that someone was going to 'catch' me fly past in outer space - I would want the BIG STRONG GUY to catch me, not the slight woman who looks like she's a size zero or something.
I want the big strong GUY to catch me.
2 Stars
