BizzleCast 62: "THE MARTIAN" Film Commentary by The Bizzle

A radically humanistic and realistically utopian take on the ultimate fate of the human race disguised as a feel-good space teamwork story that captured audiences imaginations and is going to be a critical tool in enticing younger people to engage with science in general and astronomy in particular. On a mindblowingly low budget of around $100m with legendary director Ridley Scott at the helm, THE MARTIAN in 2015 managed to upstage Christopher Nolan’s INTERSTELLAR from the year before (which also had Matt Damon and Jessica Chastain) with more compelling characters and a more grounded and realistic science that was always delivered with a personal touch — never straight exposition. But as great as the plot and action are, it’s the brilliant casting and the mixed comedy-drama deliveries of all of the cast that makes this not only one of the best films of 2015, but one of the great science fiction movies ever as well as one of the most rewatchable films of all time. As Papa Bizzle puts it: “the humanism of this movie just oozes out of its pores.” Laughing out loud through the entirety of a Ridley Scott movie against all odds, the drama, suspense, and of course “science-ing the shit” out of everything is a game-changer in terms of movies that romanticize science and the human project. Indeed, THE MARTIAN is a super-hero movie that’s actually a super-hero movie, gloriously bringing to life a near-future scientific utopia of global cooperation and single-minded devotion towards the preservation of human life and the uplift of all humanity. Sign up for BizzleCast on iTunes (keyword: BizzleCast) or use the RSS feed on any podcast app: http://feeds.soundcloud.com/users/soundcloud:users:35604552/sounds.rss