STACK #132 Oct 2016

CINEMA

REVIEWS

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Gritty, intense, cinematic and explosive – this is the serious actioner you’ve always wanted on dirty tactics employed to deal with the most violent drug cartels in Mexico. SICARIO RELEASED: Now Showing DIRECTOR: Denis Villeneuve CAST: Emily Blunt, Josh Brolin, Benicio del Toro RATING: MA15+

M ars movies have generally failed to engage audiences, unless it's the red planet attacking us. Even big name directors have crashed and burned on its rocky surface, like Brian De Palma with the miserable Mission to Mars in 2000. Enter Ridley Scott, who makes amends for the hash that was Prometheus with a far more satisfying return to the genre. Recently stranded on a planet in another universe in Interstellar , Matt Damon again finds himself as an astronaut cast away, albeit this time closer to home. Left behind and presumed dead after the Ares III mission is forced to make an emergency lift off from the Martian surface, Damon is faced with the predicament of how he's going to survive, and more importantly, contact NASA to arrange a rescue mission. Fortunately the habitat base is still operational, and even more fortunately, he's a botanist who can get potatoes to grow in human waste. And rather than dwell on the hopelessness of his situation, he's an optimistic and cheery chap, and it's his humorous outlook (when most of us would curl up in a corner and wait for the oxygen to run F rom its opening frame, Sicario is a masterful experience. Employing equal measures of intense sound, engaging cinematography (this is how you use ‘drones’, people!) and no-nonsense acting usually reserved for high-end TV, you’ll be on the edge of your seat for the majority of the two hour ride on this violent rollercoaster. Emily Blunt is the capable FBI agent who wants to play fair, but also wants satisfaction for losing members of her team after a booby-trapped raid. With this as a carrot, she agrees to be a part of a somewhat confusing taskforce (Brolin, del Toro) whose mission, alongside a menagerie of mercenaries, is to infiltrate the higher echelons of a Mexican drug cartel. What will soon be clear is playing fair gets no results, and perhaps not all members of the crew have the same objective. No, this isn’t a ‘I knew that guy was a baddie!’ style twist-and-turn affair. It’s instead a nail-biting slow reveal of the machinations behind crime fighting when the rules don’t apply, or are ineffective. With set pieces to THE MARTIAN

rival anything Ridley Scott or Michael Mann have ever achieved (a Mexican border crossing sequence you will never forget) and an ever-present sense of doom, excitement and amazing sensory immersion (if the sound design doesn’t win an Oscar, they're all deaf), Sicario is a hard-boiled triumph of frenetic filmmaking which has seemingly popped up out of the blue when lesser films get all the media attention. To know that director Denis Villeneuve ( Incendies , Prisoners ) is at the helm of the upcoming Untitled Blade Runner Project should give all naysayers a sense of calm and reassurance. This guy makes cinema that holds you by the throat, beats you up a little bit, and cuts you loose when it’s had enough with you. Yes! Oh, and ‘Sicario’ means ‘hitman’ in Spanish – we’ll just leave that there. Chris Murray

FURTHER VIEWING: Traffic, Prisoners

RELEASED: Oct 1 DIRECTOR: Ridley Scott CAST: Matt Damon, Jessica Chastain, Jeff Daniels RATING: CTC

Is there life on Mars? Yes – Matt Damon, in Ridley Scott's hugely entertaining return to sci-fi.

out), resourcefulness and determination to "science the shit" out of his dilemma that makes The Martian so damn entertaining. Moreover, the addition of a soundtrack full of disco hits (left behind by the mission's commander, Jessica Chastain) adds a quirky and incongruous touch to the proceedings. This is an atypical Ridley Scott movie: the spectacle and detail is all there (the Martian landscape, rovers, spacecraft and orbital sequences), only this time there's also a sense that Scott knows he's making a big, crowd-pleasing blockbuster, one that feels more like Ron Howard than the man who gave us Alien and Blade Runner . The Martian is more than just Robinson Crusoe on Mars without the monkey – like Saving Private Ryan, it never lets us forget that "the mission is a man". A survival story that celebrates the endurance of the human spirit without the obligatory spoonful of sugar, it's got all the right stuff. Scott Hocking

FURTHER VIEWING: Interstellar, Robinson Crusoe on Mars

OCTOBER 2015

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