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Apr 25, 2024 11:21
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- Immortan
- Jun 6, 2015
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by Shine
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This movie was entertaining as gently caress with some truly surreal visual effects; especially during any scene involving Mars. It was much better than both Gravity and Interstellar. Thanks for reading.
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Oct 2, 2015 04:44
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- Immortan
- Jun 6, 2015
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by Shine
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Mars is Mordor. Hydra is NASA (the Nazgul) attempting to prevent the Ares III crew (the eagles) from rescuing Watney (Frodo) in a desolate landscape.
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Oct 3, 2015 06:03
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- Immortan
- Jun 6, 2015
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by Shine
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Right, but then you basically have a revenge of the nerds movie about the pissing off the grumpy old dean. But Jeff Daniels is as much a part of the team as anyone else.
That other guy was much closer to the truth when he said the enemy of the film is Mars itself. But we do get that cut directly from Daniels being pessimistic on Earth to the disastrous accident on Mars, implying something like a causal relationship.
So the real question here is 'what does Mars represent, to those of us in the audience who will never be there?' reading the film purely literally is a mistake, given that the film begins with Watney being reborn - waking up, gasping for air, cutting the cord from his belly, etc.
The cord is also, of course, the communication antenna. So what you get is effectively a redux of the Matrix scene where Neo pulls the wire from his neck, at which point he enters desert of the real' and whatnot. So Watney really is born as an alien - and, as the titles go, we're shown his transition into becoming a human again.
That's to say Mars stands in for an apocalyptic future-Earth / exaggerated third-world hellhole. The flipside to all the suits in glass offices is the threat of ecological catastrophe, starvation and so-on. That's why the film's politics are important.
As Zizek would note, the film ends with the production of a couple. J. Chastain was, weirdly, punished for having jokingly cut off Watney's radio earlier, as of the entire storm were something she had unwittingly conjured. And, naturally, she learns Watney is alive at the same point that he officially restores communication - so in the same sense that Daniels' pessimism causes the explosion, Chastain's guilt is manifest as this undead thing that haunts everyone. So the film's 'really' about Chastain overcoming her guilt over having put Watney in this impoverished situation.
The ambiguity of the film is whether all this is more conducive to a properly Christian interpretation (the whole world has gotten together to perform impossible feats in service of the lowliest dehumanized individual, and this logic should be applied to combatting homelessness everywhere) or whether it's the liberal gradualist film I've outlined earlier (like, okay we've saved this guy and we don't feel guilty anymore. Plus US-China relations improved slightly. Let's get back to collecting rocks). And yeah: though it's important not to dismiss the former elements out of cynicism, it is mostly the latter.
After all, doesn't the narrative bear an uncanny resemblance to the saga of Doobie's Dog House?
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Oct 4, 2015 02:07
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- Immortan
- Jun 6, 2015
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by Shine
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This is going to make so much money in China holy gently caress.
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Oct 8, 2015 06:48
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Aug 22, 2015 04:30
