New movie review: Crimson Peak

Mia Wasikowska stars in director Guillermo del Toro's excellent Gothic romance Crimson Peak.

Most great directors are students of film history, and their movies are littered with references to cinema of the past. Others take it a step further and create whole-film homages to a style or genre. These are the movies really made for cinephiles and obsessives, for people with a deep knowledge of film history and a passion for the medium. They are films such as Todd Haynes’ Far From Heaven, Steven Soderbergh’s The Good German, or Michel Hazanavicius’ The Artist.

These are all rich, textured works with a deep understanding and abiding love of their forebears, and viewers with that same understanding and love will get much more from these films than the average movie-goer. This is not to say you must be intimately familiar with the melodramas of Douglas Sirk to enjoy Far From Heaven or immersed in the cinematic language of 1940s film noir to get The Good German, but it helps.

I thought about this a lot while watching writer-director Guillermo del Toro’s lush, moody gothic romance Crimson Peak. Both in story and style, it is a film steeped in the past and reverential toward the foundation on which its creepy, haunted-house tale is figuratively built. The movie is riddled with nods to the work of Italian horror masters Mario Bava and Dario Argento, as well as to classic films such as The Haunting (1963) and The Innocents.

The horror genre is clearly a part of del Toro’s DNA, and Crimson Peak will appeal to similarly engaged terror aficionados. I wonder, however, how this faithful tribute to the high-style horror of the 1960s will play for the uninitiated. The numbers so far suggest it is not playing well. It will make back its money worldwide, but no one is going to be happy about $22 million domestic in nearly three weeks of release. If I were to guess, it is not succeeding because most people do not know what it is.

This is a film made for another time. It seems modern horror franchises – and they are all franchises now – are about scary dolls or scary kids or some combination of the two. Consider the Insidious movies, The Conjuring and its spinoff Annabelle, and the Paranormal Activity series. Much as these are enjoyable movies in their own right, they are also cheap, shock-fests. They are about the jump scares and the promise of mayhem.

Of course, there is nothing wrong with thrills-first moviemaking if the movies are good. This is simply the current state of horror. Audiences want the adrenaline rush of fear and the nausea of disgust, and why not? It can be a hell of a lot of fun, but it is not the environment into which a studio can launch a throwback like Crimson Peak.

I saw the movie on opening night in a three-quarters-full IMAX theater, and I can say firsthand the vast majority of the audience could make neither heads nor tales of the film. It is not a story issue but a tone issue. Modern viewers are primed for sarcasm and meta-humor and for the kind of movies that wink at the camera and say, “Hey, isn’t this silly but also a lot of fun?” There may not be a market for a somber, serious romance that prefers to make you shiver rather than shriek.

It is a shame, too, because Crimson Peak is a stunning film. It is absolutely gorgeous to look at, the acting is magnificent, and del Toro strikes a perfect balance between florid direction and straightforward writing. The premise concocted by del Toro and co-writer Matthew Robbins is simple and classical, which leaves plenty of room for del Toro to explore the world of the story.

Jessica Chastain in Crimson Peak.

Edith (Mia Wasikowska) is the daughter of a wealthy American businessman. Thomas (Tom Hiddleston) comes to the U.S. with his sister, Lucille (Jessica Chastain), in search of investors in his clay mining operation. Thomas woos Edith, and after her father dies under mysterious circumstances, she is whisked away to England to live with Thomas and Lucille in their family’s decrepit estate, nicknamed Crimson Peak for the red clay soil on which it sits. The mansion is haunted, and the siblings clearly have some nefarious plot they are playing out, so Edith must survive threats from both the living and the dead.

The film opens with Edith speaking in voiceover: “Ghosts are real. That much I know. I’ve seen them all my life.” The first scene is of a young Edith being visited by the spirit of her dead mother, who tells her, “Beware of Crimson Peak.” The effects work on the ghosts is gorgeous in as much as the ghosts are convincingly ghoulish and frightening, but this is just their appearance. Their function in the story is less clear-cut. They are tormented souls, no doubt, but they are not malevolent. Ultimately, they seem to want what Edith wants: release from the pain caused to them by Crimson Peak.

Wasikowska continues to show tremendous range as an actress, and as Edith, she projects the perfect mix of strength and naïveté. Throughout the film, Lucille speaks of Edith’s fragility and youth, which Wasikowska easily taps into, but what makes Edith a great heroine is that her tormentors underestimate the fierceness of her will. Wasikowska is expert at channeling this determination and showing us Edith’s fight, even when she is confined to bed by illness or hobbled by a broken leg.

Chastain and Hiddleston play off each other beautifully as two people at different points on the same path. They are scam artists, of a sort, but Lucille is older and more embittered, while Thomas is slightly younger and more open to other possibilities in life. This is what makes Edith so threatening to Lucille – her youth. Chastain sulks and glowers and spits and injects a degree of humanity into a villain role that would be over the top in less sure hands.

The same could be said for the film as a whole. In less sure hands than del Toro’s or those of his incredible cast, Crimson Peak could be a Grand Guignol exercise in extravagance and eccentricity. It is not because everyone plays it straight with love of the craft and devotion to del Toro’s vision. Most audiences will not share that vision, but for those of us who do, we can be thankful there is a director like del Toro to put it on screen.

See it? Yes.

New movie review: The Walk

Joseph Gordon-Levitt stars as Philippe Petit in director Robert Zemeckis' fact-based visual extravaganza The Walk.

It would not be unreasonable to wonder why Robert Zemeckis felt the need to make The Walk. After all, the same story is told to great effect in the excellent, Oscar-winning documentary Man on Wire. However, one need only look at Zemeckis’ lengthy career and the kind of films he has always made to understand the draw of Philippe Petit’s daring high-wire walk between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center.

Consider this selection from Zemeckis’ directorial filmography: the Back to the Future trilogy; Who Framed Roger Rabbit?; The Polar Express; Death Becomes Her; Flight; and of course, Forrest Gump. Though wildly different in form and content, all of these films share Zemeckis’ gift for awe-inspiring imagery and boundary-pushing visual effects. Seen through that lens, the director would have been remiss to pass up the opportunity to recreate not only a death-defying stunt but the entirety of the World Trade Center.

Zemeckis and first-time feature writer Christopher Browne base their screenplay on Petit’s book about the “coup,” as Petit calls it, To Reach the Clouds. As a result, the film is infused with Petit’s roguish zeal and unique world view. To him, the stunt is not crazy. It is a stroke of brilliance destined to go down as one of the great artistic achievements of the century. If it does not quite reach those lofty heights, it is no less a remarkable feat of human ingenuity and audacity.

The great thing about Petit, here played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, is that he never once doubts his cause or conviction. This is simply something he must do. In this way, it is easy to see how he attracts the co-conspirators in his coup. This charming, heavily accented Frenchman’s belief makes you want to believe in him. Had he been a religious zealot, Petit probably could have formed a cult. Instead, he chose to walk the wire and to convert people to the cause of his art.

Gordon-Levitt is an ideal Petit for Zemeckis and is himself possessed of the same charisma that attracted people to Petit. The movie is split into two unequal sections. The final 30 minutes are Zemeckis’ playground for showing the walk, but the first 90 minutes are all setup for the stunt. Gordon-Levitt is asked to carry this first section and does so with aplomb. He is fun, fearless, and light on his feat, guilelessly driving the narrative forward and engendering good will until Zemeckis can unleash his special-effects wizardry.

Charlotte Le Bon and Gordon-Levitt in The Walk.

The script is a witty breeze, and the supporting cast is a delight, in particular Ben Kingsley as brusque mentor Papa Rudy and Charlotte Le Bon as ever-supportive love interest Annie, but everything works in service of the film’s climax. Few people will leave the theater talking about how good of a juggler Petit is or how lovely his relationship is with fellow street artist Annie – both patently true observations but quite beside the point. The film lives or dies with the walk.

Well, the film more than lives. It soars. I had the good fortune of seeing The Walk in true IMAX 3D. If asked to guess, I would say it likely benefits from the larger format and added depth of field, but there is nothing about the filmmaking to suggest it would not hold up on a regular movie screen.  I would, however, urge you to see it on the biggest screen possible and certainly not to wait for home video, which simply could not replicate the experience.

For sheer visual panache and emotional acuity, there is little to rival the grandeur of the Twin Towers as seen in this film. The closest comparison might be James Cameron’s Titanic, featuring another towering human achievement lost to tragedy. The difference of course is that few people who saw Titanic were personally affected by the ship’s sinking, whereas even 14 years later, the wounds of the terrorist attacks that brought down the Twin Towers are still fresh, particularly for New Yorkers.

There is resonance simply in seeing the buildings brought back to life. The skyline was less crowded then, and the Twin Towers are immediately iconic, though not universally loved at the time. In fact, some credit Petit’s stunt with turning public sentiment in favor of the buildings. It is easy to see how as Zemeckis shows us the World Trade Center through the eyes of someone who instantly recognizes its beauty and significance.

The camera swoops and swings and dips and dives around the buildings, and from the bottom up, we are confronted with their massive scale. When Petit stands on the edge of the roof, we stand there with him, and when he finally steps out onto the wire, we walk with him. This is the purest promise of cinema fulfilled, showing us something we have never seen and taking us places we could never go. For the final half-hour of The Walk, we are all part of the coup

The film ends with a consideration of the impermanence of monuments such as the Twin Towers, striking a melancholy tone that complements and lends gravity to the popcorn-movie fun that comes before. As much as we may want them to, the things we build are unlikely to last forever, but the things we achieve have the power to echo through eternity. This insight was Petit’s genius, and his gift to us was to share it the best way he knew how – by walking on his wire.

See it? Yes.

New movie review: 99 Homes

Andrew Garfield stars in writer-director Ramin Bahrani's masterpiece 99 Homes.

If the soul exists, it must have no price. If the soul exists, it must be an essential part of a person. If the soul exists, it must be the most valuable thing one can possess. That is – if the soul exists. The way we often speak of it, the soul is intangible, and being such, we do not have a lot of use for it in our daily lives. Our families cannot eat it, take shelter in it, or survive off it, so its value seems rather negligible against the raw realities of life.

Speaking in a strictly areligious sense, the devil knows this. Maybe the devil is your boss, asking you to sacrifice a part of yourself for the company. Maybe the devil is your spouse, asking you to sacrifice a part of yourself for your family. Maybe the devil is you, and you sacrifice a small part of yourself every time you go against your better judgment or your reason or your ethics. These small trades for money, love, or comfort cost us little on the surface, but if the soul exists and makes you who you are, then every piece you give up is another piece of yourself lost.

In the magnificent legal thriller 99 Homes, from writer-director Ramin Bahrani, Andrew Garfield plays a man who makes a Faustian bargain with the devil he knows, and we stare on breathlessly as he loses himself piece by piece. The suspense comes from watching and wondering how long this man will allow himself to fall apart before he realizes what he has done and tries to put everything back together. It is a shattering, heart-rending experience, and it is one of the best films of the year.

Garfield plays Dennis Nash, who struggles to provide for his mother (Laura Dern) and young son (Noah Lomax). When they can no longer afford to pay the mortgage, they are evicted from their longtime family home and forced to live in a hotel, where many other families have suffered the same fate. Real estate operator Rick Carver, played by Michael Shannon, is in charge of the eviction. Carver makes his money evicting people from their homes and exploiting government and banking loopholes in the wake of the housing market crash.

Nash earns what little money he can working odds-and-ends construction jobs until Carver offers him a deal. Carver will buy the Nash family home if Nash agrees to work for him to pay off the debt. Nash signs off on the deal, and that is how easy it is to make a pact with the devil. For the rest of the film, Nash will descend further and further into the morass and compromise more and more of what he stands for with every transaction until he resembles Carver more than himself.

Michael Shannon in 99 Homes.

Garfield and Shannon are excellent as two men with competing loyalties whose interests are briefly aligned. Shannon turns in the kind of work befitting one of the best actors of his generation. He is menacing and pragmatic but just vulnerable enough to suggest how Nash could fall into Carver’s trap. He may be playing the devil, but Shannon’s performance shows us how even the devil cannot do his job without being stained by it.

The true revelation, however, is Garfield, who was so good in 2010’s The Social Network but has been lost down the rabbit hole of superhero movies for the last five years. In fact, 99 Homes is his first non-The Amazing Spider-man movie since The Social Network, and it is a great relief to see Garfield once again with a tremendous role to play. As Nash, he is resolute and determined but beaten down by a system that has no regard for him or his family. Garfield is just 32 years old, but he slides easily into the role of weary family man. His youth works for the film thematically as well and suggests problems of poverty and debt will affect generations to come.

Speaking of youth, there is the film’s co-writer and director. Bahrani is 40 years old and has made six feature films. In 2005, Man Push Cart launched him into the critical consciousness, and after his superb 2009 feature Goodbye Solo, no less than Roger Ebert called him unequivocally “the new great American director.” Bahrani even shows up in Steve James’ Ebert documentary Life Itself, and Ebert gifts him a puzzle once owned by Marilyn Monroe. Though Ebert long championed Bahrani’s work, the puzzle felt like a passing of the torch. Here, Bahrani returns the favor by dedicating his masterpiece to Ebert.

And a masterpiece, it is. The American-born son of Iranian immigrants, Bahrani has specialized in films about the struggle to achieve the American Dream. For the first time though, he turns his focus in 99 Homes to the difficulty in maintaining that dream. This is a film about mostly good people whose lives are destroyed by greed and corruption. Nash is but one of many people who got the home they always dreamed of but could not afford to keep it. The banks preyed on these people from the beginning, and what we are watching as Carver evicts them is the final kill.

Bahrani shows us row after row of homes in the Orlando, Fla., suburbs where the film takes place. Each house represents a family, and many are abandoned. They are not empty because of people like Carver. Carver is an opportunist, but he serves a higher master – the banks, those institutions we were told are too big to fail. Implicit in that oft-trotted-out maxim is the little-discussed fact that Nash and you and I are not too big to fail. In fact, we are too small to matter.

This is the kind of film that should make us angry about the world in which we live. Hopefully, none of us will endure the pain and heartbreak of losing our homes, but statistically, some of us will. Some of us have, and our options are few. Around the midpoint of the film, Carver tells Nash, “America was built by bailing out the winners.” Nash has seen losing and does not want to see it again. He takes Carver’s deal because it is the only one on the table. No other help is on its way. For his son, his mother, and his own dignity, he trades away a part of himself, but if the soul exists, what good to his family is a man without one?

See it? Yes.

New movie review: Steve Jobs

Michael Fassbender stars as Steve Jobs in director Danny Boyle's new film Steve Jobs.

Apple founder Steve Jobs is a hard character to pin down. Some want to paint him as a god of the tech industry, a forward-thinking innovator, and a full-stop genius. Others think of him as closer to the devil, a temperamental tyrant, and a fraud who was not responsible for half the things for which he gets credit. As ever, the truth is likely somewhere between the two extremes, but death has a polarizing effect on the way we interpret the legacies of prominent figures. Look at Ronald Reagan.

Since his death from cancer in 2011, the company he founded has only grown in power, influence, and ubiquity, and there have been countless attempts to place Jobs’ contributions to the culture in a larger context. They feature titles such as Genius by Design and How Steve Jobs Changed the World. In many cases, though, they are just his name followed by a colon and some positive or negative descriptor, depending on the point the makers want to communicate.

For the new film from director Danny Boyle and writer Aaron Sorkin, the filmmakers drop the descriptor. It is just Steve Jobs. It gives the impression this will be the definitive portrait of the man and his machines, but it is not that, nor does it try to be. Instead, Sorkin’s script is broken down into three snapshots of Jobs’ life – or rather, his career, following as it does three product launches that define the arc of his time with Apple.

Sorkin is an undeniably good writer, and he has given us a slew of great television shows (The West Wing; Sports Night; The Newsroom) and films (A Few Good Men; An American President; The Social Network). As ever, his dialogue crackles with the humor and intelligence for which he is known. The problem is that the snapshot structure does not work for telling this story. There is simultaneously too much condensed into these three moments and too much left out.

To the first point, by sticking rigidly to this structure, save for two brief flashback sequences, Sorkin must include everything he wants us to know about Jobs in dialogue set on just three days in his life. There are five or six main characters, and each one’s story has a beginning, middle, and end, but because we are seeing only three specific days, each character arc happens on the same contrived timeline.

Movies are contrivances, but this stretches credulity. By the time Jobs points out how every product launch, it seems like everyone goes to the same bar, gets drunk, and tells him what they really think, you just get angry at Sorkin for clearly being aware of this flaw but taking no steps to address it.

Michael Stuhlbarg, Fassbender, and Kate Winslet in Steve Jobs.

Conversely, the movie is fairly empty when it comes to Jobs’ work. By choosing to show us only these product launches – the Macintosh, the NEXT, and the iMac, respectively – Sorkin fails to explore Jobs’ creative process. It is the ultimate tell-not-show movie as we hear in dialogue over and over how brilliant he is but never actually see that brilliance in action. Some of this falls on Boyle’s doorstep, but the density of Sorkin’s script leaves little room to play with form.

Boyle is an excellent director, but this is his most restrained and constricted film – an assessment that includes 127 Hours, about a man literally trapped in one spot for nearly the duration of the film. Gone for most of the runtime is Boyle’s usual flair for dramatic camera movement and clever, propulsive editing. It feels almost workmanlike, which is unfortunate because the best part of Boyle’s films has always been the directorial stamp he places on them.

However, where Sorkin’s work constrains the director to a degree, his words give all the performers the chance to soar, none more than Michael Fassbender as Jobs. Fassbender is a wonderful, chameleon-like actor who has shown his range in projects as diverse as 12 Years a Slave, Shame, the X-Men films, and Frank. As Jobs, he finds a new part to play – the petulant genius – and he is astounding. Though Fassbender little resembles Jobs nor really sounds like him, he discovers the character of Jobs. His performance is less an imitation of the man than an interpretation, and it works beautifully.

Fassbender, a longtime stage actor with a facility for language that helps tremendously with Sorkin’s dialogue, is by turns menacing and gentle. He thankfully avoids the pitfalls so many other actors fall into when portraying tech geniuses – often playing them as somewhere on the autism spectrum – and instead builds brick by brick the figure of a confident, volatile icon. Nothing in the film would work without the steady, grounded work of Fassbender. The film necessarily revolves around Jobs, like a hurricane, and Fassbender is the perfectly calm eye at the center of the storm.

Jeff Daniels in Steve Jobs.

The rest of the cast swirling around him is stellar as well, beginning with Kate Winslet as Joanna Hoffman, Jobs’ head of marketing and closest confidant. Hoffman is the film’s moral center and the one person in Jobs’ life with the wherewithal to stand up to him as she stands by him. Winslet matches Fassbender beat for beat and is able to project strength even as she shows warmth.

As former Apple CEO John Sculley, Jeff Daniels is given a fairly obvious archetype to play in Jobs’ father figure, but Daniels finds nuance and shading in the two men’s relationship that is not strictly on the page. In the middle section, the film’s best sequence has Sculley asking Jobs why the world thinks he fired his protégé from Apple.

It is one of the only scenes where Boyle is able to liven up the proceedings with a series of rapid-fire edits between their present-day argument and Jobs’ removal from Apple, the film’s only extended flashback. The editing ramps up the tension, while Daniels and Fassbender bring energy and passion to the conversation. Sculley is the only person in the film Jobs consistently out-maneuvers, and Daniels finds in Sculley a beaten man who refuses to go down without a fight.

In the “character actors who deserve to work more” category, we have Michael Stuhlbarg and Katherine Waterston in small but pivotal roles as Jobs’ employee and ex-girlfriend, respectively. Stuhlbarg, who was excellent in this year’s Pawn Sacrifice and will also appear in Trumbo, is one of my favorite actors and one of Hollywood’s best reactors. His changes in expression say a hundred things his words never could, and his character’s hurt silences are among the most affecting moments in the film.

Waterston, who was tremendous in last year’s Inherent Vice and the best thing about the Alex Ross Perry misfire Queen of Earth this year, stuns in a few brief scenes as the mother of Jobs’ daughter. As written, she is all fire and fury, but Waterston is able to create levels of sorrow and repressed rage that even Sorkin may have missed.

What we are left with is an often brilliant, sometimes frustrating film about an often brilliant, sometimes frustrating man. Boyle perhaps does not do enough as a director to rein in Sorkin’s more writerly tendencies, but the performances are so magical that it is impossible to look away. By refusing to take a clear stance on the man or his work, Steve Jobs functions more like a Rorschach test for viewers. You will see in Jobs what you want to see in him – saint or sinner, paragon or pretender – but the film’s real achievement is that no matter what you see, afterward, you are more likely to see a human.

See it? Yes.

New movie review: The Martian

Matt Damon plays an astronaut stranded on Mars in director Ridley Scott's The Martian.

There is nothing quite as satisfying as seeing a talented person work. It really does not matter the craft. Watching a skilled carpenter build a table can be as pleasing as watching a concert pianist perform or a top chef prepare a delicious meal. It should not be terribly revolutionary to suggest competence is appealing. It is one of the reasons the spy genre is so durable. Spies are ceaselessly competent. They accomplish with ease tasks that would confound us mere mortals, and that is why they are so damned fun to watch.

There are no spies in The Martian, but there is competence to spare, and as a result, the film is a joyous exercise in smart, big-budget moviemaking. From director Ridley Scott and writer Drew Goddard, based on the novel by Andy Weir, The Martian is the story of astronaut Mark Watney (Matt Damon), who is marooned on Mars after a storm forces a speedy evacuation by the crew of the Ares III mission. Thinking Watney has died in the storm, the rest of the crew takes off and heads back to Earth.

When their error is discovered by mission control, an all-out rescue effort begins, and the film cuts back and forth between the frantic attempts by NASA to reach the stranded astronaut and Watney’s pragmatic, life-extending measures. The film settles into a rhythm early. Problems arise, and intelligent people solve them. Another problem demands another solution, and so on until either Watney is saved or a problem comes up that cannot be solved.

Mercifully, there is no villain in the film – no aliens, no shadowy government agencies, no one working at cross-purposes to the characters. The enemies are time and space. Watney has limited resources and infinite space. He must survive on his own long enough to allow the rescue mission to reach him. A botanist, he devises a way to farm potatoes on the once-barren planet. This will buy him some time. It is up to mission control back home to solve the space problem, which is that they have a lot of space to cover to get to Watney.

Kristen Wiig and Chiwetel Ejiofor in The Martian.

Populated by an appealingly eclectic and talented cast, including Chiwetel Ejiofor, Benedict Wong, Jeff Daniels, Donald Glover, and Kristen Wiig, the ground team at NASA gets to work. Under incredible pressure and with no margin for error, they propose to send an unmanned probe to Mars with supplies to keep Watney alive until the next planned manned mission arrives. When this fails, it falls to the crew of the Ares III, still on their way back to Earth, to decide if they will risk their lives to attempt a rescue of the man they left behind.

Perhaps surprisingly for someone who made his name writing intricate, puzzle-box-type stories such as Cabin in the Woods and the television show Lost, Goddard’s screenplay is straightforward and workmanlike. More Apollo 13 than 2001: A Space Odyssey, the script is less interested in the meaning of life than in the extension of it. For The Martian, the former approach works, and Goddard and Scott smartly give all the action set pieces and narrative developments room to breathe rather than overstuffing the spaces between with needless philosophizing.

Movies like this work best when allowed to bask in silence, and on Mars, silence is the one thing not in short supply. While the top-flight cast also includes Jessica Chastain, Michael Peña, and Kate Mara, among others, the film lives and dies with the lonely, life-and-death struggle of Watney and with Damon’s portrayal of the stranded astronaut. Long stretches of the film are inhabited by just Watney and the video diary he keeps, partially for the record and partially for his sanity. In these moments of quiet solitude, the audience is allowed to feel his grief and isolation but also his hope.

Recent comments in the press aside, Damon has a charming, everyman-like quality about him that makes you want to root for him. The character is witty and affable – two traits Damon has excelled at displaying in nearly all his roles – but the dire nature of his situation is never once out of mind. Damon’s well calibrated performance is a perfect balance of light and dark, playful and practical, which is the same tightrope the film itself walks so well.

Scott has fallen out of critical favor as a director in recent years, releasing a string of indifferently received films (A Good Year; American Gangster; Body of Lies; Robin Hood) followed by three highly divisive ones (Prometheus; The Counselor; Exodus: Gods and Kings). There was nothing necessarily wrong with these works – I happen to love Prometheus – but something was missing from most of them. With The Martian, Scott proves he is the same talented director who long ago brought us Alien and Blade Runner, as well as the relatively more recent Gladiator.

Here, Scott provides the same sense of awe-inspiring wonder that has marked his best work, but it is buoyed by an inspiring story of genuine human accomplishment. The Martian vistas are the kind of breathtaking visual achievement Scott can conjure on a whim, and this movie is full of beautiful images, but its greatest success is its people.

Working from Goddard’s script and Weir’s story, Scott astonishes with more than just visuals. Think how rare that is to see a big, effects-driven movie, which this clearly is, and to be amazed by something more than how pretty everything is. In The Martian, we are amazed simply to watch smart people confront impossible odds with determination and hope.

See it? Yes.