The Start of Fall Movie Season

It was a rather lackluster summer in movies. At least for me. Perhaps as I get older I'm just more picky about my films. I've become the equivalent of a grumpy old man who yells at kids to stay off his lawn.

Avengers: Age of Ultron was the big summer movie but it underwhelmed me. So did Jurassic World. I actually spent a lot of my summer movie-going time watching already-released films in replays at the movie theater (Jaws, Double Indemnity, Psycho), and obscure-ish book adaptations.

So I have been excited for the start of Fall Movie Season. I let my subscription to Entertainment Weekly lapse, so I'm no longer in the know on what's coming out. Which is why I was curious about The Martian, because I had no knowledge of it until about a week ago. A few years ago this happened with The Debt and it ended up being one of my favorite movies of that year. I went into The Martian only knowing it was getting good reviews.

And I loved it. Matt Damon plays astronaut Mark Watney, who, after a storm on Mars, gets left behind by his crew as they think he's dead. He's not dead, though. But he is on a planet with no life and will be there for a good amount of time. Which means he needs to find a way to grow food. Good thing he's a botanist! There are a lot of good jokes in the film in reference to his profession.

Mark has such a great attitude about being left behind on Mars. He immediately inventories the food available to him. He decides to make plants grow. He decides to make water. He thinks about the problems before him and then, in his words, sciences his way to a solution. That's pretty awesome. I wish I reacted to my problems in the positive, how-am-I-going-to-solve-this way that Mark does. 

While Mark is on Mars doing awesome things, the people of NASA are trying to get him back home. Many of these scenes reminded me of Apollo 13, one of my favorite movies. It came out in the summer of '95, and twelve-year-old Julie loved it.