A Review Too Far - The Martian

This week our cinema geeks review Philomena, The Day The Earth Stood Still, and The Martian~!

First up is Philomena, starring Dame Judi Dench and Steve Coogan where an elderly woman searches for her long lost son with the help of a disgraced journalist, uncovering the hurtful truths about the Irish Nuns who sold her boy to Americans because she was an unwed mother in the 1950's. A subtle character drama about faith and family, Philomena opens up questions about both religion and politics without being too preachy concerning its message.

After that is the classic black and white Science Fiction feature, The Day The Earth Stood Still, where an alien visitor (and his robot!) comes to Washington to deliver a warning, but is instead hunted and harmed thanks to the paranoia of Cold War generals and politicians. The inspiration for many that came after it, The Day The Earth Stood Still is not without its issues, though to be fair, it was miles ahead of the drive-in movie schlock of the era.

Finally, we take a look at Matt Damon and a tremendous ensemble in Ridley Scott's The Martian, where Damon plays an astronaut thought dead after an emergency evacuation of a manned Mars mission who has to survive all alone on a desolate planet millions of miles from Earth. Hard SciFi at its finest, The Martian does its best to present realistic technology, sociology, and politics in a story about both the individual and collective hopes of humanity in its place in the stars and the value of a single human life.