Director: Phil Lord, Christopher Miller
Cast: Ryan Gosling, Sandra Hüller, James Ortiz, Lionel Boyce
Have I Seen It Before: Nope. Brand new movie. I’ve watched over 100 films already this year, and yet the amount of new films I’ve seen is shockingly low.
Did I Like It: I’d be surprised if this one doesn’t make my top five for the year. It’s a brilliantly realized, wildly plausible (not an oxymoron), science fiction epic that people will spend the next few months adoring, the next several months after that reflexively complaining about it, and the next decades feeling the need to show it to anyone we find who hasn’t already seen it.
There’s a deep vein in science fiction that says—perhaps foolishly—that humanity has within it the ability to reach and fix its seemingly impossible problems. It’s fueled the Star Trek series through any number of ups and downs over 60 years. It makes Armageddon (1998) shamefully watchable. Here, there is no guilt. It’s a buddy film wrapped in the work of a scientific think tank. I’d be surprised if I didn’t try to catch it again before it leaves theaters.
The real surprise here, though, is the work of Lord and Miller. They’ve spent most of the the two decades earning a reputation of turning bad ideas for movies—21 Jump Street (2012), The Lego Movie (2014)—into unusually watchable fare. They’ve done that by largely mocking the idea that the movie should exist in the first place, and letting the audience in on the fun. I always sort of suspect that they were fired from Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018) because they decided to make a comedy large mocking Han Solo, and that might have hurt Lawrence Kasdan’s feelings. And yet, here they have managed to restrain their instincts and let what works of Weir’s novel work on its own.