Chris At The Pictures

Third time’s the charm for director Ridley Scott as The Martian takes him back into the stratosphere. After messing up McCarthy with The Counsellor and making a mockery of Moses in Exodus, Scott’s latest adaptation (taken from the pages of Andy Weir’s hit novel) is a much-welcomed return to form.

Botanist Mark Watney (Matt Damon) sees red when his fellow astronauts are forced to abandon him on the surface of Mars. A freak storm jeopardises the mission and Watney is left alone to ‘science the shit’ out of his surroundings to survive until the next spacecraft arrives…in four years’ time.

Damon finally stops reminding me of a decade-old Team America gag and glows in the central role. Scott makes the best of massively promising source material by giving us a Mark Watney who is as witty, indefatigable and just plain fun to hang around with as we’d expect. Somehow this fusion of Gravity’s Ryan Stone and Mythbuster’s Adam Savage commands our full attention while still allowing the allure of beautiful landscapes and a shoe-tapping disco soundtrack to slip through.

When you’re armed with a supporting cast including no less than Chiwetel Ejiofor, Jessica Chastain, Sean Bean, Benedict Wong and Kristen Wiig, there’s not a lot that can harm you. Never does the film feel crowded or directionless, and everyone has just enough development to throw them clear of thumbnail sketches. It would be incredibly easy to make Jeff Daniel’s disapproving NASA executive a moustache-twirling villain, but the film is far above mistreating it’s characters in that way. Everyone’s clearly having the time of their life, and this is no more apparent than a sequence featuring David Bowie’s Starman playing over the cinematic equivalent of a high-five. 

The issue was always going to be how you make the journey of Watney and his would-be saviours entertaining once the initial hurdles of life on Mars have been conquered. One would imagine there’s not an awful lot to top a single man eking out a life on the fringe of existence, but whether it’s growing food on a dead planet, trying to get a single word to cross 140 million miles of void or facing the heart-stopping finale, the excitement (and the laughter) in this orange odyssey is green across the board.

The Martian bears the trappings of a young director in his creative prime. How much of this youthful energy emits purely from Weir’s novel or Goddard’s script is debatable, but for now I’m quite happy to put it down to the spirit of collaboration that permeates the whole piece. This is a joyous adventure against the odds, manned by a crew that fails to put a foot wrong.

Pixels (based on a short internet film of the same name) depicts the fallout when footage of video games sent into space are misinterpreted by an alien race as a battle challenge. The aliens attack in the form of classic video game characters (realised rather brilliantly by state-of-the-art special effects), and arcade champions Brenner (Adam Sandler), Ludlow (Josh Gad) and Eddie ‘Fireblaster’ (Peter Dinklage) are recruited by Colonel Violet (Michelle Monaghan) to halt the invasion.

Now that’s not too bad of a premise, or at least it would be if the rules of the games were ever properly explained, made any sense, and weren’t just a vehicle to say ‘Ugly, overweight nerds deserve fame and sex because “they’ll appreciate it more”’.

Let’s begin with the honking great elephant in the room: Adam Sandler. Of course, the second he was announced as the lead, we’ve been bombarded with all sorts of articles and think-pieces about how the pride of Manchester, New Hampshire is heralding the end-of-days for cinema. Obviously he is, but in Pixels it’s the character of Sam Brenner, rather than Sandler himself, that is the slimiest element. Within thirty minutes, Brenner has already stolen a jar of money from a child, leered at Monaghan’s backside in plain view of her son, called her a snob for not kissing him and berated a group of soldiers for being ‘a bunch of girls’. Our saviour, everyone!

The remainder of the cast aren’t much to shout about either: Monaghan is drafted in to serve as the lone woman with a voice outside of serving puerile humour, Josh Gad reverts to shrieking when the piecemeal script runs dry (which is a lot), Kevin James is presumably tired from his Paul Blart shenanigans so gives zero effort, and Peter Dinklage is totally, utterly inexcusable. As much as it bothers me how much 80’s nostalgists control our various sources of TV and film, seeing them represented by such a torpid bunch almost makes me feel embarrassed on their behalf. It’s not even real nostalgia: there’s no depth of reflection here, just a group of talentless frauds showing you Pac-man and saying ‘Hey, remember that?!’

Aside from all the anguish the film has already caused to real-life fans of retro arcade games, there’s also additional insult here for people of colour (the only characters in the film captured by the aliens hail from minority backgrounds, and Serena Williams is gifted the horrid celebrity cameo as she is pimped out to Dinklage’s character), for women (the second most active woman on-screen is presented to Ludlow as a literal trophy who cannot speak) and basically for anyone with an ounce of taste. There was even pain reserved for yours truly, when Gad takes a breather from squealing his every line like a stuck pig to sing Tears For Fears’ classic hit ‘Everybody Wants to Rule the World’, thereby ruining my favourite song forever.

I wouldn’t usually resort to such vulgar language, but if Sandler and co. are allowed to sneak slimy ‘humour’ into a supposedly family-friendly film, frankly anything goes: big, sweaty summer blockbuster season blew it’s load early this year, and Pixels is nothing more than the mess left behind, wiped up lazily with cinema tickets then left to fester in screens nationwide.