“Loners”: ALEJANDRO INARRITU’S ‘THE REVENANT’ AND RIDLEY SCOTT’S ‘THE MARTIAN’

 © 2016 by James Clark

      I love film stories where the protagonist is not simply haunted by an oversight but is palpably surprised by rare traces of insight, due to his or her carnal strengths. Fortunately for me and, as I see it, for all of us, there are quite a few cinematic virtuosos who excel in conveying such singular moments. Today, however, instead of trying to put out there the often easily missed treasures, I want to draw attention to the phenomena of film products which, on paper, seem likely to be handling such golden matters but in fact are largely intent upon quantity of approval as against quality of output. My reason for straying away from the usual excitements is a recognition that several such films might harbor their own kind of significant beachhead (or provocation) where surprises may well up for audiences in unpredictable ways.

This is a storm-tossed interpretive venture. But the increasing fate of important work being denied fanfare and serious distribution seems to demand some kind of account by which to get a grip on what might be in store. I think that the undiluted popular triumph of Inorittu’s The Revenant(2015)spreads much farther than the cash flow of a facet of the entertainment industry. While it is true that that auteur (manqué) has now become a darling of the awards self-service of the Gucci corporation, we must not lose sight of the passion from which his enterprise has gone ballistic. (Nor should we overlook the subterranean current of innovation running through an industrial and fashion design concern like Gucci.)

The Revenant unleashes a relentless spree of desperate agitation. What does it hope to accomplish by way of its hyperventilating screenplay (by Inorittu and Mark L. Smith) couched in lovely, but not shatteringly so, landscape cinematography by cameraman, Emmanuel Lubezki? Before tackling that very challenging question, there is a third clarion call in this mixture to be measured very carefully, namely, the protagonist’s frequently looking back to a life of affection with a woman and their young son steeped in the priorities of her aboriginal spirituality, if not to say, mysticism. Mystic, mysterious shards from this quarter do definitely have a role to play in this panorama. The question is, however, how steadily does that asset (closely linked to the remarkably tentative landscape) reach its potential?

    From the opening moments all three of the factors are up and running. We begin with a reverie from the point of view of the protagonist, Hugh Glass, consoling his little boy in the aftermath of a U.S. Army massacre of a Pawnee village, leaving the wife and mother no longer alive to instil precepts like, “As long as you can breathe, you don’t give up.” Despite the bracing declaration, we await some traction for this mini-sermon to touch our heart beyond the cliché stage. Breath can, as we know from films making their bids long before Inorittu came along, evoke abysses of fertile motion. But our film circulates the words and forgets to breathe. It skips onto a scene of a flood tide (picturesquely and perhaps melodramatically anticipatory) washing across the floor of a forest of lofty pines while Glass aims and fires his early 19^th century musket at a moose, a gesture which takes us a short distance away where his colleagues, finalizing the preparation of fur pelts, soon become the hunted for a tribe of Indian warriors who proceed to massacre the frontiersmen in such a way that the intimism of breath and bounce gets bogs down in a narrative imbroglio the likes of which has been selling popcorn for a hundred years. The numerous attackers proceed to shoot arrows through throats seconds after they emitted historically primed articulations and fire rifles from horseback and treetops, spattering blood in such a way as to put a yogi entirely off one’s bliss. Glass, of recent occupancy of solitude at some level, rushes along with his son to the shocked, delirious and largely dead trappers and directs survivors to a barge-like raft where they make their escape. Putting us on notice that the narrative flood—derived from a novel titled with a view to the check-out counter, namely, The Revenant: A Novel of Revenge—has an insatiable appetite for that brand of melodrama headed for mainstream conclusions, Glass, on leading the survivors away from that vessel being an easy target for the enemies before long, runs afoul a mother Grizzly bear with her cubs. And after killing the beast with a knife, he is covered with life-threatening claw and bite wounds leaving him unable to move or speak and thus becoming the center of a protracted crisis trumping by far the mess all of the others occupy. At this juncture it has become abundantly clear that the physical exertions in store are Exhibit A, a full moon creating a tide of resonance-thin reality TV for devotees of that very dubious reality.

The leader of the U.S. Army-sustained hunter and trapper search for bounty in the form of furs in Montana in 1823, namely, Captain Henry, seeing at a glance that Glass has now become a liability, in their hopefully successful retreat to a distant outpost/ headquarters, opts for putting the until now useful scout out of his misery, but he finds he is unable to do the job. (Like the breathing intimation, here again is a primal moment ripped out of focus.) The shotgun pointed at Glass’ head raises a slight disturbance; but the good Captain’s soft features presage the fizzle quickly at hand and plough the field of mystery in such a way that the mystery bows to curiosity. Though we have been privy to Glass’ self-confidence in the capacity of scout for the routed soldiers of fortune—a position seamlessly stemming from his being at home in the wilds—that protagonist has shown so little of his breath as a timbre of primordial consciousness that his situation comes to us as a function of a man ill at ease with those he has become linked to. In the course of his asserting some authority (his athletic poise proving intuitively his leadership qualities) about abandoning ship, he is attacked, in a rather impressive prelude to angering the bear, by one of the hunters, Fitzgerald, cleaving to the much easier option of letting the boat do the work as compared to lugging backbreaking bales of salvaged furs over killer mountains. (In fact, more to Fitzgerald’s dismay, the bales have to be buried, to be retrieved at a distant date.) Metaphorically tearing some flesh away from the hide of a Glass obsessively polishing his rifle, Fitzgerald ponders out loud how the hated navigator and his son were the only survivors of a recent massacre. (The taunt about his son’s being a questionable tough guy impels the now-lone-wolf pretender to snarl at the boy, “I told you to be invisible.” What is definitely not invisible, even now, is the nineteenth-century-melodrama-certainty that there will be a showy showdown between Glass and Fitzgerald, proving nothing more than who is the better man in strictly athletic terms, the far less juvenile issue of better being buried by the dramatic and thematic priorities of a second-rate filmmaker.)

Within that series of misfiring unique stature, the father-and-son alien team stage an expressive uprising to somewhat steady the rolling-over vehicle. Whereas the opening vignette has Glass calming his boy, “It’s OK, son…” and it can’t do much at that stone-cold pop-up moment for the audience, the boy (named Hawk), in the nightmarish situation of his father’s being close to death(a situation conveyed to be more clinical than sensually overwhelming), does, at long last, raise the curtain upon real crisis as compared with the frantic summary hitherto. Hawk comes up to Glass’ rustic plinth and whispers in his ear, “I’ll be right here…” However, and most edifyingly, before the remarkable cinematically prepared abysses of that moment in the forest can attain to magisterial impact, there is a cut to the assassins haggling with French subversives (known, with an investment of lyricism far removed from the present examples, as coureurs de bois, runners of the woods) as to the horses they expect to acquire in trading their ill-gotten fur pelts. One of the Gallic pirates loudly divulges that “a woman with big tits” is at the top of his trade. Having thus dropped the temperature to absolute zero, the better to satisfy the audience default zone of voyeuristic diversion, Inorittu brings on a snowstorm; an admission by the Captain that there is no way Glass could be carried over hundreds of miles of steep and treacherous terrain; a bonus-rewarded death-watch detail including Fitzgerald; and the murder of Hawk (who had deflected the former’s rifle about to shoot the invalid who did go so far as to agree [by blinking—perhaps a regular occurrence in social conflicts] to be put out of his misery) as soon as the coast was clear. Glass regards that latter villainy, foam forming on his lips and face and his eyes are charged with how hard real life can get. Fitzgerald drags the fragile, feverish accident victim to a snowy grave site he had speedily fashioned and covers the intensive care catastrophe with soil, before leaving—mere shooting having become smaller lustre for his lust to obliterate viciously a trace of the uncanny which he bridles at for reasons he could not have explained.  (The vocabulary of religiosity rather surprisingly dabbled with by the complainer who dreams of buying a look-at-me ranch in Texas seems to have something to do with it.) On this platform of Grand Guignol melodrama, the near-corpse and near-quitter stirs, drags himself out of the grave and claws his way to Hawk’s body. There again, the abyss that means true fortune wells up, Glass reaching for a scrap of moss to place in the dead boy’s mouth. There the three factors suggesting gravitas in this production combine for an investment which could be and should be determinant. Glass passes out and in his feverish dream he sees his wife dying in slow motion while soldiers look for more targets. He hears the boy repeat the logic of breath (“…you don’t give up…”) and now recalls another of her peoples’ sayings, “The branches blow in every wind. But if you see the trunk you have stability.” What we don’t see is the wellspring of solitude such homilies require if they are to take root.

   The Revenant, its title pointing to a return from the dead, could have brought to the fore a range of kinetic experience whereby veering off course and growling may be countered by those primordially demanding choices initiating fruitful possibilities of sensibility and their terrain of affection. What in fact we receive from the film is “A Novel of Revenge” against Fitzgerald, freighted down with Ultraman-Endurance-Challenge tangents, 4X4 ads and globetrotting treasure hunt teamwork that never stops and never fails to push the ratings. On waking by Hawk’s corpse, Glass struggles noisily—gasping, groaning and growling like a Grizzly—along the forest floor by way of arms and shoulders ripped about by the bear and now infecting. The offending animal’s pelt has been left behind and the victim (not really convincingly) manages to get up on his feet and put on the huge coat. The implausibility of this iron man feat could have been mitigated by a delivery of coincidence between Glass and that savage and beautiful and rudely loving sensual bolt of mystery. This moment, however, is remarkably devoid of palpable uncanniness. (It takes one’s breath away that the same cinematographer scorching the cosmos for several of the films of Terrance Malick could be coming up empty here.) Inorittu settles for a sort of shorthand Surrealism, flashed out there for titillation not serious rebirth. The ensuing trek back to a supposedly affecting slummy stockade which Glass had signed into teems with close encounters with ruin, numbing wilderness (going so far as managing to make a meteor boring) and melancholy rehearsals of native guideposts—a notable one, coming from a Pawnee loner encountered during a buffalo stampede, who saves him from dying of hunger and from his wounds, being, “Revenge is in the Creator’s hands.”

    The Ultraman Challenge does not hold a candle to the ultra-phenomenality being given the bum’s rush for the sake of a market of couch potatoes and fitness freaks who crave excitement without sacrifice or exertion with extremely reduced excitement. (Soon after donning the bear’s largeness, Glass struggles with much crawling and gasping to the top edge of a steep cliff showing a river far below. A snappy cut deposits him to the river’s edge where he finds a refreshing drink.) There ensues a wow of a circus with but one performer and unlike a competent circus where the pacing, lighting and kinetics strike some mysterious and joyous sparks, we receive from the pseudo-invalid a series of surface-only close shaves: plunges into roaring rapids to deny that tribe of thieves another scalp; stealing a horse from the French brigands, galloping away from them by hurling horse and rider off a cliff (not as accommodating as the first one) only to land in a treetop, softening the impact where, though the horse dies he, supposedly in critical condition, merely passes out—only to bring the house down by ripping out the horse’s guts and tucking himself into its cavity (to keep warm? to give the slip to his pursuers? to give the customers something to talk about when it finally ends?). There is such a thing as too much “awesomeness;” but Inorittu, who probably brags about how much chilli pepper he can consume, has found a critical mass who have never heard of it. Of course—and you never doubted it for a second—he reaches what serves as home base and, after a canny chase, he kills Fitzgerald in a battle where blood and flash bathe the affair in banality. (The random cruelty dished out earlier to several other players along the way does not effectively convey anything about the hardness of life; instead it is a spinoff of the cowardice-fuelled stupidity of life, on the basis of which our woozy helmsman settles for decorating thereby an arena where extreme, ego-drunk physical exploits supposedly shine.) Glass hears his enemy mock his zeal for revenge and quite possibly dies from these latter wounds (a vision of his wife’s beckoning him drifting in and out of the scene), scowling into breathtaking landscape that, being rootless, does not add up to breathtaking at all. (I can’t resist bringing to bear here the Nicolas Refn film, Valhalla Rising (2009), with its consistently dismal wilderness which we could watch all day because its protagonist, One Eye, provides us with aptly expressed peril that digs its claws in.)

Lone wolves occupy a lofty position in many of the most dramatically potent films. As, at this point, we straddle the cases of two lone wolves who do not live up to that fraternity, it is the situation of the viewers—not the marketing-besotted artistes—which keeps us on the case. That the two films in view here are clearly creatures of clever marketing surveys constitutes, from our perspective, their promise (having [with one lovely pinch of cheeky rebellion, to stand as something additional] never for a moment concentrated upon the elusive riches of the history of reflection and its newish and most compelling channel of the history of film). Those actually producing these travesties are write-offs. But those rarities in the seats snorting up the poor mixes of rigors, options and both physical and emotional menace could live to fight real battles. As we sift through a night out, with The Martian(2015)—by an auteur, Ridley Scott, who once, with his films, Alien (1979) and Blade Runner (1982), knew how to say yes and how to say no (films we’ll follow up, after this account, in the capacity of protracted and delightful chasers)—lubriciously beating us over the head with the dogma of scientistic ultimacy, we adopt the sightlines of those few geeks gobbling this up who have come to be troubled by the troubling poetry of science.

In the process of rescuing accidental lone wolf protagonist Mark Watney—the only human on planet Mars after his being left behind by a space exploration mission having to get out of town fast in face of a visibility-blurring wind storm—his best friend, pilot Rick Martinez, razzes him along the air waves, “You and your botany [Watney having very cleverly devised a potato garden to increase the emergency rations] …not real science!” Everyone onboard shares an anxious laugh by way of the pilot’s stab at sophisticated comic relief along the well traversed pecking order of their species where cosmological physics is where the top brains and the top excitement live. Though this cadre of super-smart and resourceful frontiersmen and frontierswomen cuts a dashing figure from the perspective of earth-bound, non PhD mortals, before we put into play any of their exploits we face a task of recognizing that their tittering about the power-load of their profession closely resembles banter at the Vatican, amongst a gaggle of Cardinals. What appears to be with this film, as with The Revenant, a nuts and bolts suspense saga of wiggling out of a big and deadly mess, must not, for those of us who regard movies as capable of doing something important which mainstream science can never do, be left unchallenged along with its concomitant baggage of classical science braced latter-day Yankee know-how. (During the slog to normality, our protagonist, producing a blog presumably to reach forward to millions of years, opines, “Luckily I have helping me the greatest minds on planet Earth.” More myopic gushing amidst this pious aggrandizement comes in the form of:  “Tell them [Mom and Dad] I love what I do. And I’m very good at it. And I’m dying for something big and beautiful. I can live with that.” Then there is, “Everyday I look at the vast horizons… just because I can,” that remark eliciting smirks from the Mother Ship, in homage to his eschewal of artiness, his being, in fact, like them, a confirmed cretin.) As alluded to above, The Martian must be handled with due consideration for its having on board a helmsman who did bring to life meaningful work. While commissioned to push the buttons to push the profits, does he have anything up his sleeve to do some constructive damage within the constraints of multi-million-dollars of profits?

The narrative here, on the face of it, is a feel-good apple pie which can be summed up quickly. In the aftermath of his being gored by another kind of bear, Watney—declaiming like one of those old Charles Atlas body-building ads, “I’m gonna have to science the shit out of this!”—proceeds to very cleverly rejig the equipment of the base camp in order to start a little potato patch; goes on to brainily bring to life the only land rover not totalled and thereby better position himself for deriving the best from rescue services; devises a crude but adequate communications machine to indicate to NASA that he survived the storm and their next job is bringing him home; and moves his rover to an earlier, unmanned (“Pathfinder”) space craft,  brilliantly bring the latter’s gear back to life to effect a nifty rendezvous. At a NASA headquarters of variable authority and skill we find that the major skill is in the hands of non-whites, with the managerial/political, image-anxious, risk-averse and decidedly not-right-stuff-scientific, white “Director” of the organization being a disappointment and a source of inefficiency and bad morale all round. Whereas he worries about the crew coming home after their scrapping the mission (opting for not letting them in on and so being distracted by their colleague’s being still in the game), the young calculators of shooting the works on behalf of Watney are imbued with the spirit of inventing untried methods to bring the botanist back alive in face of a very (too) long traditional flight to a loner who doesn’t have a long-term survival package.The Chinese space program has to take up the slack after the first step by NASA to stage a rescue flight burns up at liftoff. A young black physicist in a hoody at a Pasadena think-tank figures out that by turning Watney’s crew around and sling-shotting it around Mars and a rendezvous in space the time-line can be mastered. It’s a success (of course), brought off with the special ingredient of the craft’s captain being a very bright and very gung-ho woman. Back at home Watney becomes a mentor for aspiring space researchers, taking special care to tell them—a   bit rich coming from someone with the self-awareness of a candy dispenser—about their having to attain to a balanced sense of imminent death.

The nonstop nonsense of this paper-thin adventure calls out for irony with a very sharp blade. Knowing a lot about machinery and mustering adept calculations are all to the good. Effectively confining one’s range of action and understanding to those possibilities is demonstrably grotesque, all the more so when within a league sustaining and rewarding that simplism. Watney’s peril, like that of Glass, immediately known to all of us as essentially fail-safe by means of the stunted, sentimental softness of his dramatic circumstances, is far more absorbing as a pretext for putting on display hegemonic scientific culture than exposing our protagonist to the depths of peril. The mission crew and the variegated crews back on earth seem never to relent from tossing each other road blocks to circumvent and then showering the answerer and fixer with characteristically muted praise for their somewhat divine cleverness. Were there some cogent excitement about this preoccupation we’d see matters differently. But the standard flood of smug precision sends a clear message that intellection along with smartass digs and Boy Scout smarm constitute the acme of consciousness for these only too efficient go-getters. During the storm Watney is impaled with a thin shaft of lightweight metal (curiously enough, setting itself in contrast to the melodramatic arrows in the air at the outset of The Revenant). In digging himself out of the now-calm red-soil dune having buried him (a Glass moment, with a catchy difference being that the latter event is bathed in self-conscious horror placement, whereas Watney exudes pulling oneself out of a turnpike pileup; you could actually regard the whole timbre of The Martian as suburban sprawl going cosmic), he hastily pulls off his outfit, emits a brief noise of discomfort and, reaching the base-camp performs self-surgery by positioning a mirror to fully disclose the punctured gut. He expertly pulls out the foreign object and sutures the breach. The sense here of a body under siege and yet not registering a convincing flood of alarm—going on to cry out, next day, “I’m not gonna die”—defines our protagonist as a Martian indeed, a maven of materiality remarkably lacking a factor of materiality definitive for earthlings. The war cry, “I’m not gonna die,” most readily fielded as a spunky confidence in one’s resilience and resourcefulness is, at the same time—and here the late-entry, Scott, begins to do some invisible renovation on a vehicle he simply could not come close to loving— (as fielded along the film’s asteroid rain of denial) an exposure of cowardice, an ineptitude you don’t overcome at universities, and infinitely more important.

Ridley Scott’s two great and very early science fiction films were saturated in the timbre of death being definitive and imminent. Could he fully subscribe to the patent contrivance (as far removed from art as you can get) he shepherds here, in the wake of the firing of the film adaptor being not up to directing? How abundant wholehearted respect could he, like David Lynch, a student of visual art, muster toward a nerd like the writer of the novelistic template, Andy Weir? I doubt that Weir noticed the early alarm code when that wind whipped up, namely, “Storm Warning!” There was a film titled Storm Warning (1951)—and it’s very unlikely Scott had never seen it—about the Ku Klux Klan and how Ginger Rogers snuffs out one of their chapters. Such a rough legacy, Ginger notwithstanding (think of The Hateful Eight), certainly casts some doubts about The Martian’s bemusing situation of non-Caucasians calling the shots in America. I’m guessing that Weir was not a big fan of Stanley Kubrick’s film, Space Odyssey (1968). That film links to game-changer, Commander Melissa Lewis’ tag line, Storm Warning, inasmuch as Ginger’s partner, Fred (Astaire) is an item (not named but very much to the fore) as the too smooth, too chipper, too mainstream dud of the space program in Kubrick’s infinitely darker film about a high-tech loner more interested in ambient music than repairing cars. The suburban guy (one of the loner’s colleagues) is the one jettisoned in the opposite direction from the planet where Fred’s classical rationalism at least musters some decent dance numbers. (Watney’s ongoing critique of Melissa’s disco collection—all that is to be had in the way of music at the base camp—raises the surprisingly serious question of what would constitute musical punch in the eyes and ears of the vaguely irascible and boundlessly tone deaf gardener.)There is a scene where smooth, chipper, mainstream Watney sets up, in hopes of linking to the world at large, a wide circular range rimmed with solar panels. This clearly echoes the Fred-executive in Space Odyssey making a reconnoitre, on the moon, of a large black monolith, ringed with floodlights. The daunting mystery of Kubrick’s muse seems to sneak up and take a bite out of Watney’s mystery-deficient engineering. Those cruising along on the tiny-tots’ nerd-fest would not make this connection. Nor would they twig onto the blurscape of the sudden tempest in its brief and hated (“We’re scratching! That’s an order! Let’s beat it!”) deconstruction of business as usual. (By the by, a watchword of The Revenant is “Business is business.”  I’m betting that Scott, from out of a career of bringing (rather inconsistently [because not being in full control of the screenwriting and TV ad writing]) visual and sonic zest to projects you can’t science the shit out of, has introduced embarrassment after embarrassment for this cheap and presumptuous little vehicle. Its trouble with Mars doesn’t look good when measured up to Kubrick’s trouble with Jupiter. The Ares III turning around to rescue our hero is a carbon copy of the huge bone-like craft where Dave stages a mutiny. It even features that Royal Wedding rotating doorway. That Kubrick’s Hal (Kubrick having no trouble seeing the hellishness of high-tech in the hands of low-wit) was a beatable disappointment must be measured against the “I’m frightened, Dave”-billions so cherished here. The throngs tracking and cheering Watney’s Mr. Fix It performance and the “powerful sublimity” of the army of geniuses (angels) doing their bit, snake their way to Fellini’s La Dolce Vita—a nice cover for all the softness in view—and the snotty school kids dazzling the planet with nasty crap about a miracle and its promise to land us all in an infinity of Easy Street. We see a lot of the lovely, heavenly red desert of the Red Planet (also known in some connection with war). Scott masterfully depicts its surprising beauties, just as Michelangelo Antonioni, another brilliant visual stylist, brought forward the beauties of an industrial hell hole in his Red Desert (1964). There we find a protagonist trapped in its midst and trapped within a family of techie vipers. She comes out of her misadventure with strange sunshine to spare. (She would never commit Watney’s ridiculous exaggeration, “I’m the first person to be alone on a planet…”) She’s not expecting billions to cheer.