3095 The Martian: NASA, MARS and Matt Damon | Movie Review
When astronauts blast off from the planet Mars, they leave behind Mark Watney (Matt Damon), presumed dead after a fierce storm. With only a meager amount of supplies, the stranded visitor must utilize his wits and spirit to find a way to survive on the hostile planet. Meanwhile, back on Earth, members of NASA and a team of international scientists work tirelessly to bring him home, while his crew mates hatch their own plan for a daring rescue mission.Freedomain Radio is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by signing up for a monthly subscription or making a one time donation at: http://www.fdrurl.com/donate
In fact, some people told me to watch it for the special effects.
And since I come from that background, I was tempted, but I heard the plot wasn't particularly interesting.
Right, right.
So I skipped that one, but I did watch The Martian.
Yes.
It was quite an experience, let's put it that way.
Yeah, it's a little confusing.
I'll just sort of tell you the first thing that struck me, and tell me what the first thing was struck.
The first thing that struck me, Stoy, was that why would you send a spaceship to Mars where, like, a strong wind with no warning blows it over?
I mean, that's...
That seems a little like, as far as mission parameters go, like later on in the movie, oh by the way, this is spoiler city for everyone, but later on in the movie they're like, well we have to test this tiny rocket for 20 days.
And I don't know, like I'm not an engineer, I'm certainly not a paunchy Asian fellow, but I would pretty much think that if you have a spaceship that can blow over with approximately 30 seconds warning, I would include that in the tests.
Like, I would.
Maybe I'm off on left field here, but that would seem to me a fairly important consideration for, you know, a multi-year space voyage.
Don't blow over would be pretty key in terms of that.
Yeah, absolutely.
And frankly, I didn't pick up on this, but the first thing that annoyed me was also in the beginning, which is, again, spoiler alert, the sandstorm.
Ends up taking out at least one of the crew members, which is the main character, gets hit by debris.
And they lose sight of him.
And so the commander, which is this beautiful woman...
I forgot the name of the actress...
That doesn't matter.
Generic military hottie, yeah.
Yes.
And she is like, oh, you know, you guys go in the shuttle, I'll look for him.
And she can barely walk.
The wind is that strong.
She will not be able to pick him up and carry him inside.
Yet she continues to search for him because we have to have this tragic moment of...
The commander, the female, incredibly strong female commander who is looking for the lost crew member.
I just said, what the hell are you doing?
Mars is like half the size of Earth, right?
So he would probably only weigh like 100 pounds.
Well, whether she could do it or not, but it just seemed kind of futile.
I can't see a thing.
But I'm going to grope around in the dark while the spaceship is blowing over.
But of course, they can't exactly have a heroic person who's like, oh, he's gone?
Let's get out of here.
Yeah.
Well, that's a good point.
The gravity is lower, but just the force of that wind, she could barely walk, which is why I found it interesting.
It's like, oh, what are you going to do once you pick him up?
You know, they can see a guy driving a rover on Mars using their ultra fancy-dancy telescopes and satellites and Hubble's or whatever, right?
They can see a guy wandering around peeing on Mars, but they can't see a giant storm crossing the Martian landscape in time to give them enough warning to get inside.
Yes.
A lot of coincidences and weird and unexplained events take place in this film.
If you're watching it, be prepared for that.
Okay, the one that I just was like...
I'm willing to go with really attractive models end up commanding the military.
Okay, I mean, I'm willing to go with Wonder Woman there.
I mean, I'm fine, you know.
But there are certain things where it's like, oh, come on!
So, if I understand this correctly, he's wandering over Mars...
Which has no oceans, and basically, I would imagine, it's half the size of Earth, but Earth is like, what, two-thirds water or whatever.
So it has a landmass that is larger than the entirety of planet Earth's landmass.
And he's wandering around, and he trips over a spaceship that's been there for years.
Yeah, I believe it was a probe.
Yeah, so a probe that had been there for years, apparently, even though there are giant windstorms that tip over enormous spaceships, the windstorms had not covered up the parachute of a probe from years ago.
And bear in mind that later in the film they mention that they expect his body to be covered in dust.
In a year or less, right?
Yeah.
And this is a probe from, I think they said, 98 or 97.
96, something like that, yeah.
And given that this, so this is more than 20 years, this thing has been lying in an incredibly dry, dusty, stormy desert, and he trips over the parachute.
Yes.
And it's working!
Well, it's American technology, of course it will work.
I just, I mean...
Oh, God.
That was something else.
And so, yeah, the number of coincidences.
I have another question.
You know, I know, Morrison, Martian topography is one of your expertises, so I have another question.
The question, is it possible, given that he had to travel, what, 3,500 kilometers?
Across a landscape with no roads, obviously, right?
Can you think of any place on Earth where you could drive for 3,500 kilometers without encountering a mountain or a crevasse or a quicksand or soft enough sand?
Like, how on earth did he get that far?
Well, in the film, they show it as a straight line.
I would imagine if one had to explain it, he was choosing the best route, but I don't know.
I have no idea.
I do find it funny that what they did, they took a map and they drew a straight line with a ruler.
It's like, um, is he really going to just walk this, or drive in a straight line, given the terrain?
Yeah, it seems unusual.
I mean, surely at some point the sand gets soft enough that it's tough to pass.
Like sand dunes get stuck in, like sand buggies get stuck in sand all the time on beaches.
And again, I know it's, but it's supposed to be science fiction.
There's supposed to be some science involved.
And that just seems too much.
Like that seemed like just too much.
Oh, sorry.
I've got a couple other ones, but what else do you have?
Oh, just in terms of science issues, well, I believe they said this in the future, so they probably have some fancy explanation for the technology, but what the hell is an oxygenator and how the hell didn't he run out of oxygen?
I guess an oxygenator converts exhaled CO2 to oxygen.
But surely there would be some loss in that whole process.
I can't imagine it's a perfect situation.
But he can make water, so maybe he can make oxygen.
I don't know.
I also found it interesting that he was worried about his oxygen or energy running out, yet in those scenes he had lights turned on all over the place.
It's like, wouldn't you conserve a little bit of energy?
But the cinematographer would be displeased with that choice.
Yes.
Hey, you want to come to a movie that's pretty much pitch black the whole way through?
That's right.
Sometimes you have to take those bullets.
I also couldn't help but wonder because he stayed pretty buff the whole way.
And again, not to be too much of a purist, because they set the standards of the science stuff pretty high.
I'm going to have to science the shit out of this, right?
That's what he said.
Yeah, that's what he said.
I'm going to have to science the shit out of this.
And so they were like, science, science, science.
So if you're trying to conserve both oxygen and food energy, wouldn't you stop working out?
That's what I would do.
In fact, there was this old, I believe it was a martial arts film.
I'm not sure where it was made.
I believe it was Chinese.
But basically the martial art is there.
It's encountering a tough period, economic.
I think the country was occupied.
So his family was very poor and he couldn't afford much food.
And so his son asked him, Daddy, why aren't you working out anymore?
You're a martial artist.
And he said, because I will have to eat more.
Right.
Very, very basic thing.
Yes, when you exercise this much, you will be consuming more food.
But that doesn't seem to be taken into account, even though he was doing some very, very heavy labor.
Yeah, I mean, so he's doing heavy labor and seems to be working out.
Now, I can sort of understand why they're working out on the spaceship, right?
Because the problem is bone loss in space, you know, that sort of makes sense.
But down there, I mean, he just seemed to stay remarkably healthy.
Like, no cavities.
I guess he had toothbrush, tooth-braced, and all that.
But that's always what I sort of, you know, it's teeth that get you in those kinds of situations, like on Desert Island and so on.
Like, it just takes one little piece of food to get lodged under the gum line.
But I guess there really wouldn't be a lot of germs up there, right?
Because it's space.
So he wouldn't have to worry about getting sick or anything.
It would be a pretty sanitized place.
Although it is interesting, yes, that he ran out of ketchup but not toothpaste.
At least we don't know.
Right, right, right.
I guess he wasn't eating bad.
Like he wasn't eating a lot of sugar.
I know he had some sugar which he used for stuff.
So there was some science stuff that I really felt I had to hold my nose on.
I'm willing to go that he can grow potatoes out of his own shit.
I mean, I'm from Ireland, so that's pretty much the national economy for most of the history of Ireland, so I'm down with that.
If you've ever had dinner at Steph's house...
Yeah, that's right.
We call them shit-tatoes.
Not again!
Steph's cooking again!
Oh, God!
We call them, you can have shit-tatoes or stench fries.
Ketchup does not help you.
Now, what was it that happened?
Why did his garden blow up?
I missed that.
I might have been looking down to find my water or something, but, you know, those movies always make me thirsty.
I have no water.
I think he had this decompression chamber and something happened to it.
I didn't even pay attention at that point.
I was getting rather bored with the film.
Yeah, I mean, about a quarter of the way through, I'm like, really?
Two and a half hours of, like, shit happening and him finding a way to solve it in ways that are very implausible?
All right.
I remember there was a film called Buried, if I remember correctly, which was somewhat similar.
In fact, going into this one, I expected similar development.
And Buried, and this is, by the way, one of my biggest issues with the film, the lack of emotional depth.
There was no development as far as his emotionality and his character.
And we'll get to that later.
In a second, because it is a reflection of how men are often portrayed in films.
But it was starting to get rather boring because there was no progression.
He was the same guy when he started, when he got stranded on the planet and a couple...
Actually, he stayed up to a year there, right?
I think a little longer, but it was something around that.
Yeah, and the only thing apparently that happens with a year of dreading, like dreadful, horrible isolation, like on another planet.
With no hope, a feasible hope of rescue or survival, which is worse than being in solitary confinement in the dark for a year.
You know, the upshot of that is you still have all the daemonesque charisma, and by God, you are still able to make jokes about being space pirates.
I mean, that is...
I would not say...
There was a little bit of progression, and that was his jokes were getting progressively more corny.
Yeah.
He moved on to disco music at a certain point.
That was the progression in the comedy.
Oh, you have terrible taste in you.
And this to me was the most annoying part.
Initially I got bored, but when I started thinking about it, I got more and more annoyed because the way they set him up, all right, he could say that these jokes are his coping mechanism.
I'd be fine with that.
But the thing is, they established him as this jokey character in the beginning before this happened.
And there was no progression, no transition, no change in his behavior after he was stranded.
The only emotional outbursts We're rare, and when something went really wrong, it would be a scream, and then everything was the same.
It's like, this guy has no emotional life whatsoever.
Not to mention the fact that he continues to make these immature jokes, and this is contrasted against...
Hey, hey, what?
Wait, who are we talking about here?
Corny jokes are a sign of mental breakdown?
All right.
Fuck!
Says the guy that has turned corny jokes into a business model.
Only if you're stranded on Mars.
Okay.
Thank you for that footnote.
Insert that, Gabe.
I appreciate the footnote.
But yeah, and this is contrasted against his commander who is deeply disturbed by what happened on Mars and not being able to save him.
And of course later she learns that he's alive and now she's disturbed by the fact that she left him there.
So she has this deep experience of what has happened.
She's mature.
She's a competent, you know, as far as in the confines of the film, she's a competent leader.
And there's this guy who makes jokes What was it?
At some point they told him that they were broadcasting his message to the whole world.
And I think he swore or said something that apparently offended even the president.
Like, oh, alright, I see how it is.
At least there was a little bit of progression in terms of how men are portrayed.
They allowed him to be competent in something other than killing people.
Yeah.
There's a little bit of progression as far as Hollywood is concerned.
He was competent at things other than killing people.
Although, at some point, a little too competent, perhaps.
He said he was a botanist, and he was disassembling machines and fixing electronics.
I was like, eh, alright.
Space MacGyver.
Space MacGyver.
That's a good one.
I need chewing gum to make a warp drive.
But that is, to me, the part that annoyed me the most.
If you want to talk about the way men are portrayed in the movie, I mean, you know it's a fictional movie just off the bat because that much time, energy, and resources went into saving a single white male.
It's to put him on trial for patriarchy, so it's okay.
I really think the tie-in is from a bunch of other shows that I've watched.
I don't know if you guys picked up on that, but Will McAvoy graduated from the newsroom to be president of NASA. I thought that was quite an upgrade and an accomplishment.
All the people that haven't seen the newsroom will have no idea what I'm talking about.
Okay, first of all, I want to just talk about two man crushes, if you don't mind, just very briefly.
First of all, I think that we need to have a socialist redistribution of Matt Damon's charisma.
What the fuck chance do the rest of us have?
Like, there's no chance.
That cockeyed grin.
First of all, I'm obsessed with his nostrils.
He basically has the same breathing apparatus as two humpback whales side by side.
He has blowholes.
He has huge and uneven nostrils, which they seem to enjoy shooting from below.
I thought we were going to go spelunking in the caves of Mars.
But he has like a ridiculous amount of charisma.
And it's not fair.
It's absolutely not fair.
I mean, he's like Freddie Mercury to the karaoke singing of the rest of the planet.
And I just, I think we need to find ways to carve it off and redistribute it to the rest of us.
It's just, it's not fair.
I would follow that man into the very gates of hell himself, particularly if he was led by Jeff Daniels.
You know, I think...
I have to say a man crush on Jeff Daniels at this point.
When he's not driving around in a dog mobile.
That's the campaign.
It's pretty important.
The universe is trying to balance itself by having him star in shitty films, because if he was this charismatic and doing good films, oh man, we wouldn't have a chance.
If you like Matt Damon and Sand, you know, if you have a Matt Damon and Sand fetish, this is the movie for you.
We'll just say that.
The Talking Heads put out an album called Sand in the Vaseline with some reference to gay practices.
But anyway, yeah, so I just, like Matt Damon, like I could watch that guy sleep.
And obviously I have on many occasions because, you know, I know where he lives.
Before he got his training order, it is.
Yeah, I mean, he is something else.
Acting talent in this was just kind of okay, I thought, but holy crap, he's just so charismatic.
At the end of it, he's got his professor glasses on, and he's got his black shirt on, and he's just so charismatic.
And it's like, okay, yeah.
Tell me what to do.
You are the Pope of my betaness.
That's all I need to say to Matt Damon.
You know, hack off a slice.
You've got more charisma than you could possibly use in an entire lifetime.
Hack off a slice and spray it into the air.
You know, spritz the betas a little bit.
Give them a chance.
Come on!
Instead of more goodwill hunting, though, we get space movie.
Oh, yeah.
That's a little depressing to think of.
I can't believe how long it took for David Bowie songs to show up.
You know, Starman?
It's like, you know that's coming.
It's Countdown to Starman.
It took like two-thirds of the film to show up.
But it did eventually show up.
All right.
Hold on, hold on, hold on.
Let me just say this.
I didn't finish my cameos and caveats from other series that popped in.
I thought it was quite upsetting that Frank Underwood had actually sent Zoe Barnes into space to get rid of her.
I mean, pushing her in front of the train in the second season was obviously a false flag.
So that was very upsetting for me to be aware of.
I gotta imagine, though, I mean, are these astronauts fucking?
Is something happening here, being up in space for multiple years?
I mean, and, you know, some attractive human beings up there.
And, you know, oh yeah, just another couple years up in space, sure.
Do they actually, are they eunuchs?
Like, do they castrate these people before they send them up?
What occurs?
I don't know.
This was not alluded to.
I was disappointed.
I, uh, yeah, I can't imagine no one has an affair.
I mean, and masturbation in space, you know, like three years, that's a long time to go without an orgasm.
I mean, unless they're actually hiring, like, Franciscan monks, they're going to have a pretty tough time keeping the spooge in the containers out there in space.
Hey, did someone sneeze?
I just floated straight into something.
Now it's just another nocturnal emission as I rubbed up against a bulkhead.
Jesus.
And what's with all the astronauts with large families deciding, hey, I'm going to abandon my children and my wives and husbands in some respects to go in space for multiple years?
Those things don't seem to go together very well for me.
If you're so singularly focused and you want to be an astronaut, maybe you don't have the wife and 18 children before you get that part of your life over with.
I don't know.
Alright, let me mention something here because this bothered me as well.
So the bald astronaut who has like four or five kids, so his sum total of parenting the whole time was floating around and grabbing at water with his mouth in zero gravity, right?
Was he showing the children how they were conceived in a way?
Yeah.
No, it's like, but let me tell you something.
I mean, I'm sorry I can't be with you kids, but at least you can watch me having way more fun than you'll ever have.
That one wife was also very...
She was upset at first when she was told about the extra two years or whatnot in space.
And then he's like, but come on, he'd do it for me.
And then she was totally fine.
She was happy.
Like, just put the light switch.
It's like, that's very realistic.
Yeah.
Well, you know, obviously she's banging Jorge the gardener.
And no rush back, you know?
I'm his hoe, because he's a gardener and a hoe.
Anyway.
But no, it's just, I don't know.
I mean, no children existed, you know?
You're going to need to work 24 hours a day for 19 years.
Okay.
No kids exist except on a webcam.
There were no low-life children were brought onto the set whatsoever.
And it is, you know, this...
It's a child-free zone because that level of ambition and commitment looks fun unless you're home hugging a picture of Daddy and crying.
Yeah, that was a...
Can we move on to politically correct casting?
Oh, the incredibly diverse NASA cast.
We're going to go there?
These demographics seem a bit...
Hang on.
...based on the information I have.
The Asian engineer?
I was totally okay with that.
I just wanted to point out.
Well, yeah.
I think demographically.
And to be fair, I thought the black actors were excellent.
The guy who played the twitchy genius.
Donald Glover?
Yeah.
That's not Danny Glover's kid, is it?
I don't think so.
He's a rapper and a comedian.
Interestingly, a rapper plays an astrodynamics expert.
Alright, so as far as I understand it, Mike or Stoyan, if either of you could look this up, the Fields Medal is the big medal for mathematics, right?
And it's been handed out for what, like 100, 150 years?
It's been a while.
Could we look up the number of black recipients of the Fields Medal?
Because it's funny, you know, they want to break stereotypes by having black astrophysicists, but they have to hire a black rapper and comedian to do it.
Right.
Certainly, North American black culture is not heavily focused on mathematics, as far as I understand it, at least based upon the random sampling of rap videos that I've seen.
Not a lot of mathletes in the black...
Hero culture.
And so do we have percentage of NASA managers who are black?
I don't have that, but I'm just thinking of Bester Flanagan being awarded the Fields Medal and how well that would go.
Or how well that would not go.
Holy crap.
And look, I mean, it's funny in a way, and I was thinking about this today, just how damaging this is to blacks.
Because I know that they're trying to be nice, and they're trying to say, okay, well, the two fields where there's conspicuous absence is, I think, mathematics and blacks, and economics and women.
I mean, there's some great black economists, and there are women who do great things, but economics and women and math and blacks, for whatever reason, don't seem to mix that well.
I mean, I think it was, was it Charles Murray who had a list of black Nobel Prize winners over the last hundred years?
And actually black female, sorry, female Nobel Prize winners, there were more of them in the sciences from 1900 to 1950 than there were from 1950 to the present.
And it sort of has struck me.
I don't know if you guys can look up.
I don't know if the data has been updated.
He wrote this book about 15 years ago, I think, Human Accomplishment.
Can you just have a look and see black science Nobel Prize winners?
See if there's anything that's come up.
Actually, there are a few of them, but not in the science.
It's mostly literature, peace.
Oh yeah, and women of course get them in literature as well, but in sciences in particular.
The vast majority are for peace, the rest are literature, and there is only one guy who was awarded a Nobel Prize for Economics.
Sir William Arthur Lewis.
Yeah, one econ, no science, right?
No science.
And Barack Obama's World Peace Prize in there.
Oh, don't get me started.
We did a great video on that a couple years ago.
People should go get up and watch it.
And so I get what they're trying to do, is they're trying to encourage blacks by portraying math, excellence, science...
Stuff on the big screen, right?
But I think it actually has the opposite effect.
Because I think what happens is blacks look at the movie and say, wow, you know, blacks are fantastic at math, right?
And then they look at Representation in places like NASA or Google.
I think in Google, like 2% of the employees are black.
And they say, well, wait a second, because in the media, all I see is these really excellent black scientists.
And then I look at science or technology companies, and I see almost no blacks.
And I think what happens to blacks is they then say, well, they must be so racist against blacks that there's no point going into that field.
Which is really tragic.
Anyway, I just wanted to point out that have there been black astronauts?
I'm sorry, I should probably know this, and I feel like I looked it up at one point, but...
Any brothers in space?
Yep.
Oh, yes.
A lot of black astronauts, actually.
Fantastic.
And Hispanic astronauts as well?
Have they managed to cross the invisible border with space?
Trump's going to build a wall around Mars.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and assume that the Hispanic astronauts are legal residents.
Yeah, we got some Hispanic astronauts, yeah.
Excellent.
When you mentioned Jorge the Gardener, I was very curious whether he was in the country illegally.
Yeah.
Is there another topic you guys wanted to mention on this, or I got another one to float by?
Go for it.
Alright.
This seemed to me like an entire giant government program.
Like, it's really cool to see all of this stuff happening in space, but all I could see is unborn generations of children burdened by staggering amounts of government debt, weeping slowly into their stale porridge, which is all they can afford to eat because...
NASA technology jerk-off fest has destroyed their future.
Jeff Daniels at one point, yeah, I'll figure out how to pay for it.
I'll find the money.
That was actually the only mention of funding.
I was paying attention for that.
Yeah, they did say that Congress doesn't want to give NASA more money, and it's like, yeah, because you build spaceships that fucking blow over, you idiots.
I'll just find you the money, though.
I'm sorry?
Can we order one without the blowover capability, please?
Yeah.
Well, I mean, what's the problem with it blowing over?
You just tip it back up again using your giant space jack.
God, our spaceship blew over.
Hey, did you ever think of that beforehand?
In flimsy satellites that can blow over and impale Matt Damon, that's stuff you don't want either.
Yeah, I mean, they didn't build.
I mean, if this is like, and that's why I asked at the beginning how long they've been there.
So if they've been there for a month, then, you know, they didn't build even close to the parameters of what they needed to, right?
Because they said, well, you know, they gave us this much food, but they packed twice just for redundancy.
Really?
So redundancy is really important.
Yeah, so they pack twice for redundancy, you know, just in case you get lost or lose your bus fare, right?
And so they pack twice the food for redundancy, but they don't pack a spaceship that doesn't blow over in a storm that happens the first month where they have no warning.
If there's a storm that can blow things over, how about building them so A, they don't blow over, or B, At least you have an early warning system called all of the satellites on the planet.
Did they have more important things to look at than the first manned space mission to Mars?
Jesus.
Was Cassiopeia slipping off her bathrobe?
Sorry, that's a total geek astronomy joke.
Unfortunately, the climate modeling they have for Mars to determine major storms are going to be hitting them in the near future is similar to that on Earth present day in the real world.
Oh no, the CO2 on Mars.
All of the dust is going to sink into more dust.
Or maybe that's why they revealed the spaceship.
So there's this giant government program, which is they spend...
I don't know what the price tag was for going to Mars.
Half a trillion dollars is like 500 billion dollars something to go to Mars, right?
So there's a government program called Going to Mars, which is done so badly.
And no one pointed this out in NASA. No one said, really?
What?
The whole thing blew over?
What?
That doesn't seem right.
We sent them to Mars on a spaceship that flew over when the wind picked up?
Ah!
Nobody was like, wow, I'm glad they got out of there alive.
Otherwise, our incompetence would have cost even more lives.
So, there's this giant government program called Sending People to Mars.
The spaceship blows over, which necessitates another giant government program called Going Back to Mars.
It's like a perfect government program.
And everyone's cheering as their children's future is bled away into space financially.
It's a perfect government program.
Let's send people to Mars.
Let's do it so badly that we have to now go back to Mars and spend even more money.
But guys, they got some soil samples.
Mars soil?
I mean, dig a hole in your backyard or something, but Mars soil?
Well, like they, uh...
Like they've never read War of the Worlds.
Let's bring back things which possibly have alien microbes to Earth.
Never been a problem in fiction.
I'm sure it won't be a problem in fact either.
The Indians love the smallpox blankets.
That was great!
Yeah, that's right.
Sorry, sorry.
Wasn't it interesting that they weren't able to grow any food, any vegetables, until the guy got stranded and figured it out because, you know, he's a botanist, apparently.
Right, well, of course.
But, you know, suddenly, because, I don't know, necessity.
Oh, he figured that out in like 15 minutes, too.
He's just like, oh, I'll just do this, this, and this, and oh, look, I'm growing a potato out of my own shit.
Delightful.
Well, and also, doesn't that help?
That recycles oxygen, too, right?
Because they take the CO2 and put out air.
Yeah.
Space MacGyver, though.
Yeah, yeah.
No, I mean, I'm a bit of a nerd for these, like, staggering space solutions or staggering science solutions.
Like, did you know that?
You know, I just – I think that stuff's kind of cool.
Like, what – stuff you can make a battery out of, you know, stuff you can make a bomb out of, stuff you can make a transistor radio out of, which apparently is everything.
But I just thought that was – That was...
I don't know.
I find that stuff kind of cool.
It's fun to watch until you go onto Neil deGrasse Tyson's Twitter account and find out it's all bullshit.
And he tells you why it's wrong in every different white pop.
Wait, wait, wait.
What?
He's done everything wrong with The Martian?
Every space movie that comes out, Neil deGrasse Tyson goes through and goes, okay, this was wrong, this was wrong, this was wrong, this was wrong, this was wrong.
You mean the list was fairly long for this one?
I gotta think there's gonna be a few things that he's found in there that don't make sense.
Oh, another one.
From what I know, there are some issues with infertility amongst female astronauts because of the exposure of the eggs to radiation, cosmic radiation.
Wait, this sounds like the opening of a Marvel movie.
My mom went into space and all I got were these 19 tentacles and the ability to fly through telephone wires.
But you see, when one of the female astronauts came back at the end of the film, they show her actually having just given birth, if I remember correctly, about it.
No, that was the dad.
So, if I understand this right, the entire space program is just another goddamn government program to get smart people not to have babies.
I believe so.
Like the welfare state itself.
Let's tax the smartest.
There aren't as many issues for males.
We'll take out very smartest people and irradiate them until they can't have children.
It's like the Catholic Church.
That's right.
It's the new monastery in space.
Although I'm kind of glad the Pope can't breed currently.
That wouldn't go not too well.
Why would Chinese take a break from hacking into United States computers to actually help them out in a space program?
Because science?
It was the Japanese, though, Steph.
It wasn't the Chinese.
It was the Japanese.
No, it was the Chinese.
It was the Chinese?
Was it really?
Yeah.
You're so racist, you couldn't even distinguish between Japanese and Chinese.
Well, the big Tiananmen Square picture was a bit of a hint.
It's not just a backdrop in Tokyo.
Plus it was snowing.
Anyway.
It's alright, you're American, you still haven't forgotten about Pearl Harbor.
That's right.
All I can say is, foreigners!
Foreigners!
How come no one's built a wall yet?
I'm scared.
Oh, the Chinese have.
And I think it's a rumor that you can see it from space, even though I don't think it's actually true.
I think you can, but no, they thought there were Hispanics in the North.
And they just freaked out.
Scottish Hispanics as well for the Romans.
The Mongols are coming.
The Mongols.
Imagine Donald Trump is an Asian man.
Somebody Photoshop that and send it to me, please.
As far as the technical issues, there were quite a few.
But I would have forgiven them if, as I said, the movie had a little more emotional content.
It was very barren.
I mean, it had all the emotional content of a Sergio Leone cowboy movie.
Yeah, unfortunately...
Now, how did the plutonium heat up his balls without turning him into a giant radioactive squid?
I have no idea.
In fact, as far as I know, you need some massive protection and some very thick walls so you don't get irradiated.
Yeah, you need a giant lead condom, right?
Because they basically had this plutonium death bomb that they had to bury so that they didn't go anywhere near it.
And he's like, but when I put it between my legs, my balls heat up.
Yes, the problem is, four years later, they're still glowing like two irradiated ping-pong balls in space.
We're back to the beginning of a Marvel movie again.
Yeah, no, we really are.
We now know who fathered all the Marvel heroes.
Radioactive sperm squid.
It's the money shot you can see in the dark.
Yeah, that seemed a bit odd.
It's so dangerous, we needed to bury it, so I'm going to put it between my legs to keep me warm.
He did have the caveat of as long as it doesn't break.
But hey, Steph, he was lonely.
He needed a little bit of warmth down there, so come on.
Yeah, a little bit of action.
It really sort of bothered me at the end.
You solve one problem and then you get another problem and you solve it too.
My major solution was tripping over a spaceship.
A government employee talking about solving problems.
I didn't know this movie was a comedy.
Ha ha ha!
But I had to fight the I Love Big Brother throughout the whole movie.
Yeah.
Because it's like, yeah, I want this guy to come back.
Yeah.
It's like, he's a government employee.
Aren't we saving some money on a pension?
But I had to fight that.
I'm like, yeah, you go get that Matt Damon so I can watch him sleep again.
Because I can't watch him sleep when he's on Mars.
I'm amazed that you've forgiven him for Elysium.
Your, like, least favorite movie I think you've watched in the last...
I have to carve that part of my brain off and put it in a separate container.
Why did you bring it up again, Mike?
I have to forgive him for his soul-sucking fetish for government teachers while sending his kids to private school.
I have to carve that off.
I just have to because anytime you have any affection for a celebrity, you have to not listen to them and you have to not co-join any of their movies together in your brain.
Any YouTube fans, do not research Bono's recent comments about migrants.
Don't do it.
I find from my gated community in Switzerland that the migrant issue is not a problem.
I don't like the use of the word migrant.
I don't think it's an acceptable word.
Oh, God.
Just shoot me.
I don't know.
If smug liberal self-congratulation for moral emptiness could give me a singing voice like that, I'd be Hillary Clinton's pantsuit.
I'd cankel that up right away.
Absolutely.
Alright guys, so of the three space movies that have come out in recent times, Gravity, Interstellar, and this one, where does this one rank?
Steph, I think you've seen all three of them.
I have.
I liked Interstellar just in terms of some...
I mean, I had to hold my nose for about 95% of the quote science.
I mean, that has about as much science as a Uri Geller seance, but...
I thought emotionally when he was regretting the divorce and all that, I thought that was actually quite emotionally relevant and powerful.
It had the most feels of any of those movies.
I liked Gravity just because it was so new to me, although you really had to take.001% of the CGI budget and throw it at a decent script writer and you'd have a way better movie, but that's obviously neither here nor there.
I thought this was an oddly forgettable movie, this movie.
Yeah, it'd be a distant third for me between the three of them.
Yeah.
Yeah, I think I would put it third, too.
And it did have the potential to be...
I thought it was going to be more of a character study.
I mean, I knew there'd be all of the adventure science stuff, but I thought it might be a little bit more of a character study on the greatest amount of solitude that any human being in history could possibly have experienced.
And so he was isolated on a planet, and he was just like, wow, every place I go is new.
Really?
Yeah.
This is the level of your insight and horror.
I think the novelty of that would have worn off five minutes after you were stranded there and left to die.
First dead guy on the whole planet.
Oh, can I do one other thing?
Sure.
Okay.
First of all, I don't know why you can't have body hair in space.
That is something that...
I mean, does it clog up the air intakes or whatever?
Do they just do electrolysis to get rid of all body hair in space?
Because, first of all, you know, Matt Damon, he gets shot through the middle with a giant spike, right?
And he has the body hair and apparently internal organs of Ken, the doll.
Because...
He got shot through the middle, which, boy, anything that punctures your stomach is going to leak, or your intestines for that matter, is going to leak digestive acid into your internal organs, which is about the most ugly and horrifying way to die.
But he staples it.
But he stapled it, and he didn't even grimace when he was walking around.
Jesus, I stubbed my toe and I'm limping for a week, and this guy gets shot through the middle with a giant bolt, and he staples it up, and he's like, oh, shook that off.
I'm good.
You're assuming way too much here.
It actually got stuck in his massive abs.
I flexed, and then the bullet bounced back.
Super abs.
Yeah, that was quite something.
I mean, I mean, God!
I mean, there was another George Clooney film called Three Kings where they talk about what happens to your body if you get shot in the abdomen.
And, I mean, it's hideous.
It is gruesome.
And this guy, no doctor, he didn't cauterize anything.
Maybe he took antibiotics.
I'm sure they had those.
And I guess he chewed down some Vicodin.
But later he was like, oh, look, the staple came out.
I mean, shouldn't you be deflating with pus?
No!
Matt Damon, I smiled and the bacteria and acid changed into butterflies and ponies because charisma.
Actually, I think that is true.
That could happen.
One last thing.
Okay, very last thing.
Now, I don't mind if they come up with improbable solutions, right?
Okay, he tripped over the spaceship.
Okay, the Chinese decided to stop building imaginary cities and inflating their currency and hacking into U.S. computers to supply a top-secret military rocket to the U.S. to save a guy.
Alright, fine.
I'm willing to go with something.
He can drive 3,500 miles in a straight line across a desert rock planet and not have to change course once or get stuck.
Okay, fine.
But at the very end, even the government program to fix the government program didn't work.
Why?
Because he didn't get high enough.
So the government program, which was spent five times as much as the first government program to fix the last government program, was itself destined to be a failure.
Except that he punctured his suit and was able to hit a bullet with a bullet by flying magically through space, guiding himself, which is something he'd never done before, never been trained on.
And he managed to hit this other person in such a way That nothing broke.
You know, when he fell, you know, when the thing tipped over that he was stuck inside, the big tube, it cracked his window.
His bubble, like his helmet, right?
And this guy's like, his suit is leaking oxygen.
It's spraying all over the place.
He's going around madly.
No control.
He can't turn it off.
And he's able to somehow fly, I don't know how long it was, but a long way, and hit This woman, gently enough, that it's basically like a giant space hug.
I mean, that to me was like, oh, come on.
Like, I can't.
Like, I love you guys, and I'd have sex with Matt Damon's empty space suit, but I can't.
Like, please.
You've scienced me up, so you're assuming a relatively average IQ. You can't.
You can't do this to me.
You can't give me this as the solution.
You know, something else bugged me about that scene, and I figured it out maybe a half an hour after I walked out of the cinema, and it was, if this was a man, if we replaced the commander with a man, physically stronger man, would he let go?
If you remember, she grabbed his hand but couldn't hold him.
Oh, right.
And she insisted.
She insisted that she be the one to intercept him.
Not the other guy.
For females on the police force now, is what we're saying.
And the fact that they have deadly force accidents.
Women have almost 60% the upper body strength of an untrained man.
These guys are trained in the gym.
Obviously.
So obviously, right, and she would have less than 40% of, 30 to 40% of a man's upper body strength.
I have to catch a giant hurtling space object.
Let's make sure the weakest person with the arm strength of a tiny baby Tyrannosaurus Rex goes out to catch him.
Would Matt Damon slamming into a woman in the middle of space qualify as a microaggression?
These are the questions.
We need a feminist on staff.
No, they both have protection.
I'd also like to point out one issue that also really bugged me.
Do you remember how they made fun of him when he suggested that he punctures his suit and uses the escaping pressure for propulsion?
And how they told him you wouldn't be able to control it?
Right.
What did they do to slow down their ship?
I have an idea!
Let's build a bomb and put it on the spaceship!
Of all the things I would not sign up on, if I was in a spaceship, putting a bomb on it to blow it up!
Actually, what I think the entire blow-the-front-off-the-spaceship thing and screwed everything out into space was just a giant allegory for the five-year hibernation of the space dicks.
It was a giant nocturnal emission of the entire spaceship because it was so blue-balled from five years being around these incredibly attractive women and only shaking their hand firmly while having all of the acrobatic sexual performance.
Possibilities of being in zero gravity.
I think the spaceship just spontaneously ejaculated.
That's my thought.
No, I need the shape of the ship was oddly familiar.
But now that you mention this...
Really?
You've got spinning disks around your junk?
You might want to get those looked at.
You just might, you know?
Is this Matt Damon for having the nuclear thing in between his crotch for a period of time?
So, I mean, I kind of reckon...
It obviously was a big giant NASA porn Get more funding and let's go to space.
So it was a giant advertisement.
It was like Soviet.
It had this sort of Soviet feel of workers controlling the means of production.
I don't know those stuff.
Is it really such a good advertisement for NASA? Isn't that like McDonald's advertising like broken glass in their hamburgers or something?
Like, hey, give us more funding.
We can send some cars to die.
And all of these failures lead to another government program because at the end of the movie, aren't they sending up another spaceship?
Hey, you pay for it.
We'll go have all the fun and you can watch from home.
NASA is just big giant engineering porn.
You're not allowed to have sex, but you can watch it on a screen.
So you're not allowed to go to space because we're going to tax you and destroy any private capacity to provide the same functionality.
But we'll charge you all this money and we'll go have fun in space and you can watch.
It's like space.
It's for people who like to watch.
Intergenerational debt, but we got Tang.
So, yeah.
Good trade-off.
Evens it.
I think it's worth watching.
It's interesting.
But yeah, you have to really keep your wits about you.
Of the two and a half hour time investments I've made in movies lately, this is probably one of the worst ones I've made.
I will say that.
They could have cut 45 minutes off this baby.
I think there's better movies that you could watch out there that you're going to get a whole lot more bang for your buck when it comes to time to entertainment factors.
Yeah, and if you're as much a fan as I am, of course you have to deal with the risk, and for me it's more than a risk of security pulling you out of the theater because I'm licking the screen whenever he takes his shirt off.
So that's a challenge as well.
Steph, I'm surprised you're not trying to stretch this review out to be the length of the movie, which you did with your Elysium review, which is why I brought it up earlier.
That did an absurd amount of views on YouTube because I think people thought it was the actual movie that had been uploaded.
No, no, Mike.
No, Mike, it was the quality of my analysis.
No, it wasn't.
We have the stats.
We know when people click off the video stuff.
After you guys hang up, I'm just going to sing the entirety of A Night at the Opera, and we'll just pad it out that way.
I'd also like to conclude my observations about the film with what Matt Damon said right at the end when he was instructing the new generation of astronauts.
And I think it's a brilliant summary of what happens with all government programs.
He said to them, at some point, everything will go wrong.
Keep sucking the economic joy juice out of the next generation for your own vanity and self-aggrandizement and you'll be set.
You'll solve the problem with another government solution.
And look!
Another problem!
We need another government solution.
Hmm.
This is a metaphor for something.
I can't figure it out.
Well, yeah.
I mean, if Matt Damon was a government program, the wind would pick up and he'd just fall over.
Oh, I guess that did happen.
Too bad.
All right.
Well, okay.
Well, we'll look forward to people's feedback and thoughts.
And thanks for the chat about it.
It's good to purge the statism erotica out of my system.
I look forward to hearing what people think.
If you like these reviews, please let us know.
And, of course, drop by freedomandradio.com slash donate so we can finally get Mike into the space program.
