Apocaloptimists: PROJECT HAIL MARY and THE AI DOC

Like The Martian, screenwriter Drew Goddard’s previous adaptation of an Andy Weir sci-fi novel, Project Hail Mary is a cheerful problem-solver of a space adventure. That earlier film was a gear-headed Ridley Scott picture with astronaut Matt Damon stuck on Mars. It cut between the stranded explorer and the scientists back home on parallel tracks thinking their way through complications to get him home. This newest film is also a stranded-astronaut story problem. It finds a science teacher (Ryan Gosling) waking up years from Earth, alone in a capsule as he regains his memories and finishes his mission. He’s supposed to figure out a way to make the sun immune to a space bacteria that’s causing it to burn out. He’ll do so by scooping up samples from a distant star. The movie’s parallel tracks are past and present. In the past, Gosling’s working with a team of researchers desperate to save the planet. In the present, he’s talking to himself—mostly. The halves joined by a seriousness of purpose and a cheerful optimism, a sense that if the world were to end tomorrow, the government would ask smart people to stop it today. Isn’t it pretty to think so? 

Gosling makes a fine star for such a feat, charming and self-deprecating and flustered, but ready to lock in and put his intelligence to work of all of us. He’s hugely likable here, and has great chemistry with his scene partners, both Earthbound (Sandra Hüller) and ones who are more imaginatively deployed later to help puppet scenes to a surprisingly moving climax. The movie surrounds him with convincing special effects of the kind of pop-art realism you’d expect from a movie that’s part Interstellar. It has the hard sci-fi edge with a sentimental open heart. It comes from Lord and Miller, the filmmaking team behind the joke-a-minute Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and The LEGO Movie, and who last directed 22 Jump Street twelve years ago. They’ve returned to us with their sense of humor intact, but proportioned well here as leavening to the stakes that enhance the emotions and the spectacle instead of deflating them. It actually cares. How nice to find a huge crowd-pleaser that valorizes intelligence. It watches Gosling connecting with extraterrestrial awareness with a sense of awe at mankind’s ability to solve problems with hard work and mental energy. 

It’s a stark, and welcome, contrast to those who think we can build computers to replace us. Consider those who talk endlessly at us about Artificial Intelligence. (I cringe even to use the term, a deliberately nebulous buzzword meant to obscure all manner of tech company advertising and spin.) There are those who think an emergent super-intelligence is going to bring about mankind’s abrupt extinction any day now. There are those who think it’ll hasten a dawn of a global golden age where no one will work and all disease will be cured. Those in the middle seem to think it’ll just enslave us to super-wealthy authoritarians. (Plus ça change.) A new documentary from Daniel Roher and Charlie Tyrell wants to serve as a level-headed primer on these issues. Its feint toward definitiveness is in its direct title: The AI Doc. Its quirky subtitle Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist is a signal of its whimsy. The movie’s a standard-issue talking-head doc loaded up with little stop-motion animations, showy transitions, and squiggly hand-drawn titles. And it’s wrapped around the personal story of the impending birth of Roher’s first child. He narrates and appears as an on-screen interlocutor, driven to wonder about these issues because he’s worried about bringing a baby into this uncertain future. 

He’s suitably curious. But the movie is largely credulous. Mostly confined to researchers and speculators, with a late stop at a few CEOs who hype up their products and playact concern, the movie mostly takes for granted the huge stakes, no matter the extremes expressed. It doesn’t quite understand that the pro crowd and the cons alike are merely falling into a fictional framework (call it Terminator v. Star Trek) instead of actually addressing the reality of the situation. He briefly invites on some humanities professors to poke at the bubble—let’s think about the resources, and who benefits from setting the discourse frame at peak freak out about the future that makes it, good or ill, seem inevitably world-changing. But they get shuffled off after a few soundbites. The movie reaches one of those issue doc call-your-congressperson QR-code endings. Its ambivalence ends up making the case that AI is, like so many problems of our modern day, something most people want to regulate, but financial pressures means no one will. But, sure, call a congressman about it. See how far that gets you. 

Robinson Crusoe on Mars: THE MARTIAN

Remember the great scene in Ron Howard’s Apollo 13 where, desperate to find a way to save stranded astronauts in a failing spaceship, NASA engineers are presented with a box of spare parts and told to figure out how those fit together as a makeshift solution? The Martian is that scene for over two hours. In its opening sequence the first astronauts on Mars evacuate the planet during a sandstorm that knocks one of their crewmates off the medical signals and into the deadly dusty darkness. They think he’s dead and leave him behind, where he wakes up alone and afraid with a desolate lifeless planet all to himself. He has to find a way to make 60 days worth of supplies last up to four years, the time it could take to get someone back to pick him up. And that’s only if he can make contact with Earth sooner rather than later.

It’s a surprisingly absorbing experience to watch one man think his way through complicated story problems. Sure, it’s the sort of mystery that’s impossible to think through faster than the characters on screen. But there’s a certain convincing popcorn logic to the whole string of science thought experiments presented for our Robinson Crusoe on Mars in a relatively hard sci-fi premise. No alien twists or sudden water-filled oasis on the horizon, he can only stay in the pressurized makeshift lab or wander out with his spacesuit to scavenge whatever mechanical bits he can to make his unexpected extended stay survivable. Though it wouldn’t be hard to root for anyone’s survival in that situation, it helps that he’s played by Matt Damon, a likable enough presence on screen, equivalent to stranding peak James Stewart or Tom Hanks. He’s corn-fed Americana aw-shucks smart, putting one foot in front of the other.

We watch as he tries to power his life support systems, grow crops, and phone home. Back on Earth his NASA colleagues (Jeff Daniels, Kristen Wiig, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Mackenzie Davis, Sean Bean, Donald Glover) quickly notice movement in satellite photos and start working on ways to get in touch, and get him back. In between are his traveling crewmates (Jessica Chastain, Michael Peña, Kate Mara, Sebastian Stan, Aksel Hennie), unaware the man they’re mourning is alive and might be calling on them to help, too. All those actors are great, believable in their competence and drive, with great timing delivering complicated dialogue. It’s one of those big Hollywood ensembles where the characters are the sum total of their job descriptions (their titles pop up on screen at each intro) and the recognizable faces are meant to fill in the unspoken rest. No one has time for backstory, personal problems, or emotional appeals. There’s not even a token villain. It’s all can-do cooperation and high-stakes business.

I’m sure the armchair rocket scientists in the crowd could still quibble with the results, but at least the filmmakers have a nuts and bolts commitment to showing their work. The characters walk through each new option or development with lots of technobabble patter and math lab/science center jargon, talking through variables, calculations, and equations, triangulating timetables and press releases while weighing the needs of the many with the needs of the few. This could be dull, especially in the relentless exposition and talky narration cutting down on potential poetry of space flight and lonely unearthly vistas of red-tinted desert. But what makes it work is the crisp tick tock editing, cutting for suspense and propulsion between people crowding around computers and white boards and the lonely plight of the one man they’re mobilizing brainpower to save.

Drew Goddard (Cabin in the Woods) has adapted Andy Weir’s book into a screenplay balancing determined problem solving, often clever and surprising, with a mild but charming wit cutting through the heavy material. It’s not glib banter. It’s the light needling and gallows humor of serious smart people who are good at their jobs, but feeling the pressure. It plays into director Ridley Scott’s interest in world building, process, data displays, and men on missions, allowing him to turn this Cast Away meets Gravity by way of Randall Munroe's What If? into something his own, an easily tense space survival story, even if the end is not once in doubt. The Martian has some visual overlap with his Alien/Prometheus world in cinematographer Dariusz Wolski’s unfussy 3D views of production designer Arthur Max’s functional worn-down tech and austere sand-swept Mars terrain. But Scott also has relaxed fun with it, making amusing tension out of, say, Damon struggling to duct tape a depressurizing suit shut, or finding room for a fun disco soundtrack. It’s an efficient and entertaining workmanlike brainteaser of a movie.

Dawn of the Zed: WORLD WAR Z

Hollywood’s latest rehearsal of total worldwide destruction is World War Z, a globetrotting zombie film that approaches the zombie problem as a plague to be contained and cured. It has more in common with the techno-thriller novels (turned films, usually) of Michael Crichton – Jurassic Park, The Andromeda Strain – than the gross-out shock satire horror films of George Romero – Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead. In the detail-oriented, goal-driven throughline, we follow a representative of the United Nations played by Brad Pitt travelling through countries ravaged by zombie attacks hot on the trail of Patient Zero and, hopefully, a way towards understanding the outbreaks in order to stop them. The film is grimly satisfying, hopping from one nice suspense sequence to the next, treating the destruction soberly and the stakes with a sad weight.

It works because of the humane star power of Pitt. He’s playing a role that Robert Redford or Warren Beatty would have played if it was made in the 1970s with, say, Alan J. Pakula or Sydney Pollack behind the camera. Pitt’s aged into a still, strong, warm everyman persona very well. In this film he’s a man defined by his profession, a humanitarian, and his family, a wife (Mireille Enos) and two daughters (Sterling Jerins and Abigail Hargrove). His crisis-activated goals dovetail easily. He wants to keep his family safe and stop the developing worldwide calamity as best he can. That’s easier said than done, which gives us more than enough reason to root him on as he reluctantly leaves his family in the care of a refuge ship and flies around the world in a military plane, stopping in various countries, trying to trace the outbreak back to its source. At each stop, zombie attacks are inevitable. He meets character actors (like David Morse, Peter Capaldi, and Fana Mokoena) with helpful information (or not) to impart and traces the mystery as far as he can. Then zombies swarm into the picture in moments built out of small jolts and massive setpieces, and we’re off to the next stop.

Loosely based on a novel by Max Brooks, the film’s troubled production caused it to take on screenwriters like a sinking ship takes on water. The end result gives story credit to such heavy-hitters as Matthew Michael Carnahan (The Kingdom), Drew Goddard (Cloverfield), Damon Lindelof (Lost), and J. Michael Straczynski (Babylon 5). That makes it hard to say who I should credit with coming up with tremendously effective sequences like the opening in downtown Philadelphia in which a traffic jam erupts in violence, or the late-night rainstorm attack on a darkened runway, or the scene in which a tidal wave of zombies scramble like ants against a protective wall meant to keep them out. Director Marc Forster, used to helming prestige dramas (Finding Neverland), likable mainstream oddities (Stranger Than Fiction), and widely disliked Bond films (Quantum of Solace), along with editors Roger Barton and Matt Chesse, have somehow created a film that’s slick and propulsive all the same. Some combination of rewrites, reedits, and reshoots has left the film shiny and slick, with little evidence of behind the scenes squabbles.

Creepy and overflowing with horrifying imagery both on-screen and, more often, implied, World War Z has such an overwhelming approach to its devastation that it’s wise to keep it small on a scene to scene basis. We get the impression that calamities are occurring without needing endless shots of total disaster to understand. (Though there is one of those big disaster-movie control room maps that light up the biggest problem areas in red. I always like picking out my area of the country on those things just to make sure I’d be caught up in any given mess.) As we dash around the world following the main mission, I appreciated the matter-of-fact global respect on display here as characters from different countries and backgrounds get to be real people instead of stereotypes. Also appreciated is the way in which the filmmakers understood and valued the effect of the large-scale havoc they conjure. It’s not cheapened into a tunnel vision hero’s tale with collateral damage brushed aside as long as the wife and kids are fine in the end. The burden of stopping this plague weighs heavy on Pitt’s shoulders.

And this is no usual zombie plague of shuffling undead. The zombie effects are modern and twitchy, the once-human creatures swarming like deadly insects and chattering their dead jaws with bone-snapping sound effects. This makes for a primal, animalistic dread in their heavily-CG pack behavior, but it’s never mined for the kind of body-horror, living-dead drama so successfully vivid in Romero’s films or Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later and its sequel. Here the zombie virus is nothing more than an existential threat. It could be anything, even the flu of Soderbergh’s Contagion or the aliens of Spielberg’s War of the Worlds. In fact, WWZ often plays like a clever cross of those two better films. But it’s also a competent success all on its own, a kind of gripping summer blockbuster that kicks up a great deal of mood and suspense in moments intense and frightening, before fizzling out slightly into the end credits. The effect doesn’t linger, but it’s strong and engaging enough while it lasts.

Cabin Fever: THE CABIN IN THE WOODS

Note: I did my best to discuss this movie without major spoilers, but if you’re avoiding even hints of twists, you best go see the movie first. It’s pretty good.

The Cabin in the Woods starts like any horror movie of its ilk. A group of frisky young people head off to a remote location for a raucous vacation. This time around, as so many other times around, the group consists of people who can be broken down into all the usual types: a good girl (Kristen Connolly), a bad girl (Anna Hutchison), a jock (Chris Hemsworth), an egghead (Jesse Williams), and a stoner (Fran Kranz). On their way to the jock’s cousin’s summer cabin, they stop at a dilapidated gas station where the grizzled creep owner (Tim De Zarn) spits out chunks of tobacco and warns them away. Getting to the cabin is easy, he says. “Getting back will be your business,” he growls.

Of course they go anyway, because that’s the kind of movie this is. But before you can say, “Stop. I’ve heard this before,” screenwriters Joss Whedon (creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Firefly) and Drew Goddard (of Cloverfield) have something cleverer up their sleeves. In a pre-title scene we’ve met two middle-age white guys (Richard Jenkins and Bradley Whitford), each in shirt and tie, chatting all the way down a long, white and grey corridor, waving I.D. badges and getting in a couple of jibes at the expense of a coworker (Amy Acker). This seemingly unconnected scene is ultimately integral to what we’re about to see. This is no young-people-stalked-in the-woods movie like The Evil Dead or Friday the 13th or, or, or. There are definitely elements of that here, but Whedon and Goddard pull back and show us the strings. These guys have the cabin under close watch with a sharp eye for the expected.

You think you know where this is going. The characters are certainly familiar and won’t be explored for depth of characterization. You may even think I’ve spoiled things by revealing that the seemingly average bureaucrats have something to do with what’s about to go down in the cabin in the woods. But this movie’s better than that. It’s a work of supremely slippery genre craftsmanship with more twists than you’d think, that plays on what you think you know in order to double down on the unsettling dread that begins to sink in. When you go to a horror movie, you know things are going to go badly for the characters. When these young, vibrant people head down into the cabin’s mysterious basement and examine the creepy artifacts, yellowed photographs, and ominous incantations, you just know that soon it’ll be more than leaves rustling out there in the dark.

Because we know that there are others watching, we know that the characters are headed into a trap. This takes away some (but not all) of the scares from things going bump in the night, but it also proposes provocative questions of genre introspection. Why are horror movies capable of scares even when characters are driving headfirst (even knowingly) into predictable formula? And why is puncturing the illusion of these characters’ free will so destabilizing? You know going into a slasher movie that a masked killer’s going to hunt down some victims and the results will be bloody. Why, then, are these films still capable of great effectiveness and suspense? It’s all about the execution. When one of the bureaucrats says, “We’re not the only ones watching,” it’s clear that the movie is implicating us, questioning why we want to see what we’re about to see.

Goddard directs the script with confident genre expertise, staging jump scares with great playfulness. As the movie goes on, he and Whedon find ever more rugs to pull, ratcheting up the tension and dread. It’s all that I can do to restrain myself from writing in extensive, spoiler-filled detail about just how ingenious a genre deconstruction this film becomes. At one point, the chaos in the cabin – the running, the screaming, the hiding, the splitting up, the disappearing, the bloody implements of death – appears to be winding down to a grimly satisfying genre endpoint, the exact point that a lesser, even a slightly lesser, horror film would conclude with the feeling of a job well done. Indeed, I was prepared for the final freak out and the smash into the end credits. If they had arrived just then, I would have still found The Cabin in the Woods to be a reasonably clever genre exercise. But just as it’s coasting to a close, Whedon and Goddard tighten the screws and ratchet up the intensity one more time. The movie grows stranger, funnier, and bloodier, dissecting an impressive number of horror styles in a descent into the fiery pits of unsettling territory. The final twenty minutes or so are some kind of inspired genius.

However hugely entertaining, the movie is only about the essential nature of horror movies. The characters remain thin and, despite the cascade of topsy-turvy, surprising yet inevitable plot adjustments and a couple of killer cameos, it’s not exactly a movie of any deep humanity. (If it was, and just a little icier or more confrontational too, I’d call it popcorn Michael Haneke.) What Whedon and Goddard stage is an intense, oftentimes hilarious, slashing of expectations, a veritable thesis on the nature of point of view and audience identification in horror cinema. The final moments of the film have us asking anew whom to root for and questioning which outcome is actually the best outcome. It sets up the clichés so skillfully that, as the world of the film is so thoroughly ripped apart, subversion itself is ultimately the biggest source of both knowing winks and destabilizing fright.