What a fucking disaster of a review.
Eventually the movie review will be gone, so here’s a quote.
What’s it like for him to be alone for years? Is the sheer solitude a burden? Is the simple lack of human contact a cause of psychological derangement? Are there exercises that he does in order to ward off hallucinations, to control inner voices? And what are those voices? What does Mark say to himself? What does he think–or feel? Is there anything that he has to overcome in order to remain mentally sharp and emotionally stable?
oh my FUCKING GOD you asinine critter, don’t you think astronauts are SELECTED for their ability to stay sane in these circumstances? It’s called WORKING THE PROBLEM. They don’t show him masturbating, although disposing of the consequences would be a funny couple of minutes, and they don’t show him crying, or hitting things, or any of that stuff. Any sane person knows it happened; we don’t need to see it.
THE IMPORTANT THING ABOUT THIS MOVIE WAS NOT THE PERSONALITIES of the characters involved.
It was in their ability to work problems.
The author of this review, who’s a chump’s own chump, is under the impression that science fiction fans – a demographic that is rapidly approaching everyone who is not a religious fanatic, hermit or killjoy – want to see another movie with people talking about their feelings or their interior lives. No, we want to see a SCIENCE fiction movie. Not a movie that waves its hands when it comes to science but one that says you have to understand orbital mechanics to link up with a flying object in the Mars gravity well. Where mass and math and persistence and grit make survival possible, make triumph possible, make the unification of the world in its concern for a single human being possible.
The ’emotional tenor’ of the movie is SIMPLE.
We’re going to take our feelings, and we are going to set them aside, and WORK A FUCKING PROBLEM until it is done.
And despite the whitewashing of the movie, and yes it’s true, ethnicities were changed and that’s notable, something was preserved that I think is more important. A young black mathematician gets called a steely eyed missile man by the Hermes crew, which is, without a word of a lie, the highest praise you can give a technical man in a space crisis situation. A generation of black kids will be dreaming of Mars based on this one sentence in the movie. May the great parent of the Universe give a line of reasoning to Richard Brody, since he could really use one.
The emotional tenor of the movie is simple. Why do people rescue other people. BECAUSE WE ARE SOCIAL. Now leave me alone, I’m working a solution that’s going to help other people. You can assume I have an interior life. Because we all do.
