Tagged: Kate Mara

Box Office Democracy: Morgan

There are a lot of forgivable sins for thrillers. They can have thin characters, they can be completely implausible from premise to execution, and they can even be internally inconsistent if the result is a good amount of tension, but they cannot be boring. Morgan is a boring movie. Not all the way through but overwhelmingly and even in a third act tripping over itself to twist the audience every which way, I never quite got over the fact that the movie had never made me care.

When I first saw the trailer to Morgan, I thought it looked like they were trying to remake Alien but with a much lower budget. There were all these tight corridor shots and a seldom seen monster but instead of a spaceship it was in a house and instead of an elaborate monster it was a pale girl. It’s very possible I was primed to see these similarities because of the “produced by Ridley Scott” credit. I’m happy to report that Morgan is not the Alien remake I thought it was. There’s a dinner scene that sure seems evocative and the way everyone is always talking about directives from a nebulous “corporate” but it more or less ends there. There are some parts heavily borrowed from Blade Runner and those are a little more troubling, but I suppose if I was a first time director and my famous father was paying for my first movie I might do some things I’d know he liked.

I shouldn’t be so hard on these moments of borrowing from old Ridley Scott films, because figuring out why scenes seemed familiar was the most interesting part of the film. Put that aside and you have a lifeless thriller with a mostly muted color palate and there’s just nothing to be entertained by. Paul Giamatti has a small part and it’s a shame, because his big scene is easily the best in the film. He seems willing to pick an emotion and go with it, which is more than the rest of the film can say when every emotional response peaks with a stray tear after a big speech. I also want to give the movie and Rose Leslie credit for having a character react to the kind of intense trauma a supernatural thriller puts a person through by being overwhelmed, shutting down, and kind of leaning in to a Stockholm syndrome kind of response. It’s an interesting response in a movie dying for interesting. Without these flashes of above average we have a movie with predictable scares, obvious twists, and bland visuals. What else is there for a movie to offer?

I struggle to dump on a movie so heavily when it’s the first effort by a director in a low budget film, and then I remembered that I had just seen the directorial debut of Travis Knight. Comparing this movie to Kubo and the Two Strings feels unfair, especially when you compare the budgets ($8 million to $60 million) and maybe it is— but animation is more expensive than two sets and some woods. And you can’t buy storytelling or tension or fun, and one movie had it in spades and the other is picking over scraps. Morgan is a movie I left wanting to talk about the allusions to Ridley Scott films and how intentional they were but secretly thankful that, statistically, I’ll never meet anyone else that’s seen it because I don’t want my family, friends, and acquaintances to have suffered through this movie like I did.

Box Office Democracy: The Martian

I really enjoyed watching The Martian when I was sitting in the theater, but that love has faded quickly in the days since. There’s a high amount of amazing spectacle and suspense to keep audiences engaged but there’s an emotional emptiness to the film that makes it feel inconsequential in the long term and hurts the film. Ten minutes after I thought it was an Oscar contender released too early, two days after it feels like just another movie, and in a couple months I doubt I’ll be thinking about it at all. I suppose this is what Ridley Scott is these days and it’s so sad that the man who made Blade Runner and Alien is making such hollow science fiction these days.

The set pieces on display in The Martian are as good as anything I’ve seen this year. From Martian sandstorms to daring space stunts to random bouts of explosive decompression it’s a thoroughly arresting film. The action is interesting and it’s fun to hear all of the characters try and scheme their way out of impossible space problems. The interplay between Jeff Daniels, Kristen Wiig, Sean Bean, and Chiwetel Ejiofor is particularly crisp and feels if not what actual NASA meetings are like certainly what I would like to imagine them to be.

The problem with all these fascinating situations is we never get to see any real emotional reactions. Matt Damon is supposed to be almost certainly doomed millions and millions of miles away and with the exception of brief moments we never see him particularly sad or on the precipice of despair. We never see that reaction from anyone on earth either, neither from the people at NASA or from a member of his family, the stakes of the movie are so high but without seeing someone really care they don’t feel like anything. The Martian ends up feeling like a series of math problems to be solved and not like a life or death situation, and while approaching them like math problems might be what gets them solved from an institutional standpoint it doesn’t make for an effective movie.

There’s a chance I’m being too hard on this movie. It’s quite likely that “enjoyable but forgettable” actually describes a movie that’s more or less good, but I can’t help but hold Ridley Scott to a higher standard. I know he can make movies that are more affecting than this but seems trapped in a downward spiral of spectacle over substance that kicked off with Robin Hood, spread through Prometheus, hit critical mass with Exodus, and now has left us with The Martian a movie that barely seems to care about how little it cares.