With Oppenheimer, filmmaker Christopher Nolan has made nothing less than the Lawrence of Arabia of the 21st century. Like David Lean’s 1962 masterpiece, Nolan’s picture is epic and grand in both scope and scale, while delicately humanizing a figure about whom most of the populace – myself included, at least, until I saw the movie – know little-to-nothing.
While the grandeur of recreating the first human-made atomic reaction has transfixed media coverage and those anticipating the film’s release, Oppenheimer’s true triumph is in unlocking the mystery of the man. By the time we reach its conclusion, Nolan’s film has given us a crystal-clear understanding of who J. Robert Oppenheimer was. We understand what drove him to unleash an unimaginable weapon upon mankind and how that work tortured him for the rest of his life.
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James Mangold’s very manly and patriotic sportscar racing movie Ford v Ferrari is about as slick as big Hollywood blockbusters come. The director with credits as varied as 2001’s Kate & Leopold, the 2007 remake of the classic western 3:10 to Yuma, and not one, but two comic book franchise films about the X-Men’s Wolverine character has turned his craftsperson’s talents to the sports biopic. Ford v Ferrari feels like a movie we might have gotten 20, maybe even 30 years ago. And I mean that in a good, throwback sort of way.
The script – originally penned by Jason Keller and rewritten by screenwriting brothers Jez and John-Henry Butterworth – features, if memory serves, exactly one female speaking part. At one point, that character is reduced to sitting in a lawn chair as she watches our two manly-men heroes resolve their differences with an old-fashioned American fist fight. The rah-rah patriotism of the picture – which only ever flirts with outright jingoism – brings to mind something like Top Gun, but with race cars instead of fighter jets.
All that aside, Ford v Ferrari is also a damn good time at the movies. It’s a crowd-pleaser that offers unadulterated movie spectacle.
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There isn’t an ounce of flab on Matt Damon’s body. The same can’t be said of the latest installment in the Bourne series. Damon is reprising his role as Jason Bourne, the memory-deficient super spy, after a nine-year hiatus in which Universal Pictures attempted to expand the franchise with Jeremy Renner in 2012’s The Bourne Legacy.
The main problem with this series is that each movie essentially tells the same story. After suffering amnesia during an assignment-gone-wrong in the first movie, Jason Bourne becomes a spy that is forever trying to piece together his own past. In each successive picture, Bourne gets a new clue about the secretive program that turned him into an elite assassin. The saving grace of the Bourne movies is the tightly wound structure of each mystery. The plot always takes a back seat to the chase, as the CIA desperately tries to stop Bourne from revealing the disturbing truth he uncovers about the secret program that created him. In Jason Bourne, there’s frankly too much plot, and it detracts from the action.
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It’s a great feeling when a filmmaker capable of cinematic magic comes in from wandering the creative desert. Ridley Scott has had a rough go of it the past five years. In that time, the director helmed the debacle Exodus: Gods and Kings, the critically lambasted The Counselor, the made-for-TV movie The Vatican, and the disappointing Robin Hood. The uneven Prometheus was also released amidst that flurry but, as a return to the world he created in his classic Alien, is entertaining despite suffocating under the weight of its own mythology. The Martian is a return to form for Scott, almost matching his best work. All that’s missing here is the heavy tone that comes out of exploring themes like what it means to be human, as he did in Blade Runner. But that’s like faulting the stars in the sky because of the view from a light-polluted city. Scott did exactly what The Martian’s source material demands. He made a wildly fun, acerbically funny, exciting ride of a movie.
The film is based on the bestselling book of the same name by first time novelist Andy Weir. The author self-published The Martian in serial format for free on his own website before it exploded in popularity via Amazon Kindle. It’s essentially Robinson Crusoe on Mars, albeit far more scientifically accurate. Weir did painstaking research while writing the novel to ensure as much technical exactitude as possible. The Martian tells the story of astronaut Mark Watney, a botanist and mechanical engineer, who becomes stranded on the fourth planet from the sun when his fellow crew members are forced to abort their mission because of a harrowing sandstorm. The crew believes Watney was killed during the escape, and the scientist’s attempts to survive and to figure out how to contact NASA with no working communications equipment make up the crux of the story.
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