Reviews by JxSxPx

The Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes is the animated property that Marvel fans have long been hoping for. Directly adapting numerous issues from the early days of Avengers lore, this series finds the right balance super heroic action-adventure shenanigans and quiet character development. Naturally, it only lasted a measly two seasons before being shuffled off for a new series that rips from the MCU for inspiration.

Bright and colorful, Earth’s Mightiest Heroes begins with the original five from the comic book: Iron Man, Hulk, Thor, Ant-Man and Wasp. After assembling that team, it quickly adopts new members in Hawkeye, Captain America, Black Panther, in a slow burn across the first season. During the second, we see Ms. Marvel emerge after her origin being teased in season one, Vision, tied to Ultron in a reoccurring second season story, and a second Ant-Man.

If there’s any problem with that main group, it’s a distinct lack of diversity. Cameo and repeating supporting players like Iron Fist and Luke Cage provide more colorful personalities and mix-up the hegemony. The series also has a lack of meaty female players, with Wasp and Ms. Marvel being the beginning and end, with Abigail Brand and a few others getting the short end. Maria Hill is particularly wasted, a character rich for emotional development, she’s too one note throughout. Black Widow gets some play, but much like the films she never gets her defining moment, always performing tasks for Nick Fury and S.H.I.E.L.D.

But where the series excels is in playing with the many strange locations and stories hidden with the Marvel universe. Sure, we get to play in Asgard, but we also get to see the Skrulls, Kree, Wakanda, S.W.O.R.D., the Negative Zone, and practically everything else that Disney/Marvel can throw in without having to give Fox any money for X-Men related properties. Hell, even the Guardians of the Galaxy show up, with a roster close to the film but with a few added members. It’s charming to see so many cameos and appearances from these beloved entities and locales.

Earth’s Mightiest Heroes sees the Avengers continuity as a giant treasure chest, and they make great use of it. Not every episode will be a winner, but a consistency quickly develops among the episodes, and seeds planted in earlier episodes do eventually bloom. At times it can be frustrating wondering if they’re going to loop back around to those hints, but they always do. I can’t remember any hinted at story that wasn’t given some play within these episodes. And the finale finds the heroes and villains teaming up to take down Galactus, which is a well-known and frequently re-done story in the Marvel universe. It ends with New Avengers material as a possible third season trajectory.

While Marvel may have the live-action market, the animated front has largely been DC’s strongest format. More animated series like this and the playing field would have been evened out. Sadly, Earth’s Mightiest Heroes is something of an outlier in Marvel’s animated series output. But if they can muster up this greatness once, I’m sure that they could do it again.

One weird and wonderful love letter to the Silver Age comics, Batman: The Brave and the Bold is, in its own strange way, just as expertly conceived as Batman: The Animated Series. They attack the mythology from different sides, and for different ends, but they both do it with great joy and smarts.

Forsaking the dark, grim, and brooding characteristics of many recent Batman adaptations, The Brave and the Bold instead relies upon a dry, ironic wit, sight gags, and loads of puns. There’s a tongue-in-cheek quality that makes many of these episodes quite appealing, showing off the fun and joy of superhero stories and comic book ridiculousness. This version of Aquaman ignores the tremendous pathos of the character in favor of a heavily glazed ham baking slowly. It works, and it works really well, just as a case in point.

But wait, you ask, why are you mentioning Aquaman in a show about Batman? Well, The Brave and the Bold is a team-up show, much like the comics of the same name or the World’s Finest comics. Instead of focusing on Batman and Robin, who does appear sporadically, this show places the emphasis on lesser known heroes, like the Guy Gardner and Jay Garrick versions of Green Lantern and the Flash. Superman and Wonder Woman, Batwoman, Batgirl and other well-known Batman allies appear in special episodes, but it’s more fun watching him team-up with this B-list roster, and the creators have more freedom in their interpretations of them.

While the series if openly flamboyant, even aggressively silly, it is also unafraid of going dark, or meta. The final episode, which finds Bat-Mite becoming bored with the series lighter tone and joke-a-minute pace, wanting something darker, and deconstructing the series, is a gem. It’s everything wacky and wild about Silver Age comics written in bold text, filled with exclamation points, and dynamic poses. As a comic fan, I found this series refreshing, proving that darker isn’t always better, it’s how successfully the material is handled that matters. 

Ok, so that spinoff movie, and backdoor pilot, left a bad taste in your mouth, I get that. Trust me, I understand. You feel burnt badly by the general frustrating nature of the prequels? I’m right on board with that. I’m looking you in the eye and telling you I understand.

But trust me on this, Star Wars: The Clone Wars is great. Of course, not every episode is golden, and a few stories could have done with some judicious editing, or just not made it past the initial development phase, but as a complete work, The Clone Wars is fantastic. It’s every shade and texture of the Star Wars universe writ large.

One week we’re watching a thrilling western with a group of bounty hunters, the next it’s a prolonged political thriller in the Republican Senate, and after that there’s something childish involving droids. Not all of it works, but it explores every facet and idea of Star Wars can be, and I appreciate its scope and vision.

It delves deep into the mythology, explaining and exploring the imbalance of the Force, and the original Jedi and Sith temples. It demonstrates the training necessary to become a Force ghost, or assemble a lightsaber, or what it takes to make it through Jedi training. It’s thrilling and engaging, unafraid to go very dark and mature, or balls-out weird and wild. The Clone Wars is what the prequels wanted to be, but failed.

The first season or two features clunky and blocky animation for the main characters, and their interactions with the environments are cursory and strange, at best, but stick with the show and it becomes gorgeous and fluid. By the final season, the animation is dynamic and alive, the characters movement contain more grace and balance, and the environments are things to get lost in. I’m particularly fond of anything having to do with Asajj Ventress and her home world of all-powerful witches.

This series is an action-packed love letter to Star Wars, bridging the gap between Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith. By the time the final episode rolls, we can see where the chaos and imbalance of the Force is going, setting the stage for the original trilogy and beyond. This is some of best storytelling in the expanded universe, and luckily, for us, Disney has let it remain canon. So what does a Star Wars story look like? The Clone Wars has some surprising answers, and they’re very malleable. 

The first of three re-imaginings of beloved, and public domain, childhood stories as something darker and combined with some of-the-moment science-fiction trapping, Tin Man may be the messiest one. But that’s a very small jump, think of the tiniest hurdle that a show pony in training walks over.

With The Wonderful Wizard of Oz as the base, someone along the way decided that Blade Runner, The Matrix, and various other fairy tales were needed to add more flavor to the original story. Oh, and it needed to be a prequel in which long-lost siblings reunite, and…. Look, I’ve already stopped caring about the plot, and you probably will too. Tin Man sucks all of the joy, hope, and fun out of its original premise, so why even do it this way at all?

The pace is unwieldy, probably from too many disparate elements demanding development and not getting any, and the overall tone is a dirge march into overblown hysterics. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is not a story that demands a Lord of the Rings style heroic quest, nor does it demand so much special effects work. Oz is primarily a sweet, simple story filled with warmth and good humor.

Tin Man mistakes overly fussy production choices and special effects overkill with heart and genuine feeling. There’s no solid core here, just a lot of razzle dazzle. And the razzle dazzle is exceptional, no doubt. For a TV budget, these are pretty spectacular and miraculous. 2007 was around the time that television budgets and ambitions grew larger and more complex, as a whole, and Tin Man’s large scale production values reflect that switch. We’re no longer burden with the questionable effects work of Hallmark movies past. If nothing else, Tin Man is nice to look at.

Zooey Deschanel does her typical quirky girl shtick here, Alan Cumming seems lost, Neal McDonough gives it more pathos than it deserves, and Kathleen Robertson plays the entire thing for wicked camp. Cumbersome, oh yes, very much so. There’s so much style to burn here that it ends up having a weird cancelling effect on the overall product. 

Sprawling, like most works based upon Charles Dickens, but completely enthralling, Bleak House is yet another great adaptation from BBC. Who knew that a tale of inheritance, mysterious lineage, murder, and a smallpox scare could be so engrossing?

This could have easily drifted towards glossy, handsome but incredibly dull stuff, but it’s not. Praise be to Andrew Davies script and the direction from Susanna White and Justin Chadwick for keeping this thing moving. And for being roughly eight hours, or so, it really does roll along with a fluid pace. No moments of dead weight or wheel-spinning.

There’s a large amount of characters to introduce, and there isn’t a bad performance in the bunch. Granted, there’s only a handful of characters that recur, and they’re performed brilliantly. Anna Maxwell Martin anchors the entire thing as Esther Summerson, an orphan with questionable paternal lineage. Carey Mulligan and Patrick Kennedy are the lovers embroiled in the inheritance lawsuit that occupies so much of the film. Kennedy makes the obsession believable, even as that particular plot line wears a bit as the series wraps.

But if the series belong to anyone, it’s Gillian Anderson as the dark, mysterious Lady Honoria Dedlock. Her eventual reveal is slightly obvious, but Anderson sells her material with the élan of an actress who knows her strengths and what a great part this is. Her bored intonations in her first appearance linger long after the final episode ends.

Consider me a sucker for a well-made mini-series from the BBC, and I am frankly, but this is definitely one of the better ones I’ve watched in some time. The cast is fantastic from the top down, the writing is solid moving through years, characters, and numerous subplots with consummate skill, and the whole thing is so vastly captivating and entertaining. 

If I had to describe the films of Tom Hooper, I suppose it would be the films are like white elephants. Painfully tasteful, devoid of personality, overloaded with asymmetrical framing, glossy images, and emotionally detached, I do not respond well to them. If I can avoid them, I do, but I committed to watching the nominees in the major Oscar categories again this year, and had to endure this.

The Danish Girl tells the story of Lili Elbe, one of the first known transgender woman to complete gender confirmation surgery. Well, that’s what it purports it is about, but it’s really based upon a highly fictional book by David Ebershoff. I haven’t read the source material, but the film keeps the inner life of both its characters at arm’s length, afraid of the messy details of what they’re experiencing. Instead, what we get is two hours of Eddie Redmayne staring off into the middle distance, doing his best to look like an ethereal, feminine waif, and a deeply uncomfortable insistence on the superficial exteriors of feminine performance.

There was the tremendous potential, in another director’s hands perhaps, to dive deep into the issues of the male gaze, gender performance, body dysphoria, but The Danish Girl will have none of that. It brings this issues up in large, bold text, but doesn’t meaningful engage in them. Scene after scene finds Lili touching fabrics, crying, and watching women perform in heightened circumstances, but we see no glimpse of her inner life. We have no idea what she is thinking, feeling, or where these issues are stemming from.

We meet Lili prior to the transition, and there is no glimpse of anything being out of the ordinary in her marriage to Gerda Wegener (Alicia Vikander). It isn’t until Gerda asks her husband to wear some tights and ballet shoes to fill in for an absentee model that the first stirrings of Lili’s transition are felt. They come out of nowhere, because we have no clue who Einer Wegener is as a person, let alone who Lili is or will become. And Gerda’s story is filled with promising and fertile material, none of it used. She and Lili remained close friends throughout, and the irony of her own painting career taking off as she finds her husband’s female alter ego as her subject matter is not utilized. Neither is the question of her sexuality, nor the eventual estrangement that happened between them.

Try as valiantly as they might, neither Redmayne nor Vikander can overcome the precocious fantasy of this script, which never allows for honest depictions of emotions, but handsome facsimiles instead. Redmayne’s Oscar nomination feels like it went to the role and not his performance, which is mostly a combination of tics, stares, sighs, crying, and fondling of fabrics with his long fingers. But props to him for the courage of that full-frontal scene. Vikander manages to do better, much better in fact. Probably because she’s the closest thing to a fleshed out character that the film ever gets, or maybe Vikander’s soulful eyes and churning emotional states are just handled better by all involved. And the supporting players are wasted as Amber Heard's free-spirited ballerina, Ben Whishaw's supportive paramour, and Matthias Schoenaerts' childhood best friend are handled well by their actors, but shuffled off screen too soon. It’s heart is in a well-meaning place, but this is regressive, too tasteful, and without feeling. The Danish Girl is yet another immaculate diorama of white elephant cinema. Lili Elbe's story deserves better than this.

Bridge of Spies is a perfectly fine movie, but that’s about all it is. It’s exactly the type of film that you’d go watch with your conservative parents who would proclaim it the best thing they saw all year, even if it was the only thing that they saw. There’s no surprises, no tension, no true moments of inspiration, just a lot of well-made craft. Spielberg has done better than this, but I suppose even a master like him can be forgiven for a middle-of-the-road jaunt every now and then, no one bats a thousand.

Bridge lays everything out in the open from the beginning, so there’s no real espionage trickery to indulge here. There’s just one decent American insurance salesman who secured a pretty nifty trade for two captured Americans, one a graduate student and the other a downed pilot, for one Russian spy. The first half of the movie is more interesting than the second, if only because Spielberg feels more engaged and alive in the first half.

This first half starts off with a wow sequence, which, by this point, Spielberg can do in his sleep. In-between his normal painterly strolls and daily routine, Rudolf Abel (Mark Rylance) gathers secret intelligence from the Russian government. His ordinariness, his ability to blend into the background or large groups of people is his best asset, and he’s slowly surrounded by forces which will imprison him. The first half of the film concerns his trial, a political showcase for American due process even for an enemy in the midst.

Never entirely subtle, Bridge of Spies’ first half presents many memorable sequences. The most obvious of which is the cut between people rising in a courtroom and students in a classroom, rising for the pledge, and watching a film about nuclear fallout and impending doomsday predictions. It’s pitch-black in its political satire, presenting the Cold War’s obsession with patriotism bordering on jingoistic beliefs. Or another in which James Donovan (Tom Hanks) rides public transport only to be subjected to judgmental and belittling glances from his fellow passengers, furious that he would dare to defend an obvious war criminal. The closed-ranks and forcibly maintaining of appearances of the 50s are reinforced in these glances, and Donovan eventually returns their glares with his own steely glances.

Once the film wraps up this trial and travels to Berlin, in the throes of splitting into East and West Berlin, that things go weird. Every time the story transfers from Donovan to an American pilot going through training, landing into enemy hands, and his eventual imprisonment and torture things go flabby. There just doesn’t appear to be much interest in telling his story from Spielberg, and it feels somehow unnecessary as so much of the film is about Donovan’s journey from normal citizen into political figure. Even Spielberg’s normally impeccable craft goes limp. A shot of our pilot in front of a green-screened background is particularly bad. And the special effects used in the scene where his plane is shot down are too glossy, shiny, and obviously fake creations. The drama in these sequences becomes undercut by the questionable film-making.

Thankfully, these sequences are limited and few, but they are generously spaced in-between the better stuff in the second half. Spielberg does better in presenting the shock and horror of the sudden rift between East/West Berlin, and it is here that the American graduate student is captured. This sequence is full of high-tension, and the kind of old-fashioned film-making that Spielberg excels at. If more of the second half had been this bravura, I would have a deeper appreciation for the film.

As it is, there’s nothing terribly wrong or memorable about Bridge of Spies. Well, Thomas Newman’s oppressive score teeters on the edge of terrible. It’s a solid piece of classical movie craft from one of our leading directors. I’m just not sure what the big takeaway was here, as so much of it feels undercooked. Hanks does solid work, but his character never really changes too much. Rylance underplays everything beautifully, playing a man who is quite aware that no matter what he does, he’s stuck in a losing position. His resigned and haunted face at the end of the film is enough to earn that Oscar nomination. Amy Ryan is stuck playing Norman Rockwell housewife, shame that such a talented actress is underutilized. Alan Alda, Jesse Plemons, and Billy Magnussen, talented actors all, are also underutilized in thinly written roles, disappearing for long chunks of the film.

Too content with coloring in the lines, Bridge of Spies is too pleased with being routine. After films like Schindler’s List, Munich, or Lincoln, I suppose I expect Spielberg’s historical dramas to explore deeper and richer themes. This takes a look at Cold War paranoia, but doesn’t say anything new or interesting. It’s a well-made film, but I can’t muster up too much enthusiasm for it.

The narrative is slight, but the two central performances are beautifully detailed portraits of young love. Brooklyn is charming, if overly sentimental, eschewing the more dramatically potent stuff in favor of a fluffy romance. There’s nothing wrong with that, in fact, it’s very sweet and entertaining, but lurking around the corners of the frame is a better film wanting to break free.

The immigrant experience is a well-used story by this point, and, if done correctly, can provide an emotional cathartic experience. Brooklyn tells the story of an ordinary Irish girl, who is sent to America through the machinations of her older sister and a kindly priest, finds herself lost and adrift until she meets a nice Italian boy. That’s about it. It’s thin stuff, and it had the potential for something greater.

The dramatic stakes are incredibly low here. For a long time Brooklyn flirts with presenting the loneliness, isolation, depression, and culture shock that Eilis feels in her first year in America, but it never goes deep into these emotions. They’re all surface mechanics, and a third act return to Ireland has an accelerated parallel structure in which she meets a nice Irish boy, gets a job, and realizes that there’s nothing for her here anymore.

Anything worth celebrating in Brooklyn, and there are several things of note, comes primarily from the cast. The entire film rests upon Saoirse Ronan’s performance, and she delivers the goods. She holds the screen in several moments of quiet contemplation, searing with emotional intensity, or flirtatious humor, or sweetness. Ronan was the most captivating performer in Atonement, and it’s good to see her delivering another performance of such emotional commitment and deep excavation.

Meeting her level of excellence is Emory Cohen, as the nice Italian boyfriend she meets in America. Cohen’s all soulful stares and sexy smirks, embodying the boyfriend of my dreams, essentially. Once she goes back to Ireland and falls into a romance with Domhnall Gleeson, charming as he may be, it’s hard to imagine why Eilis wouldn’t run back to Brooklyn as soon as possible to be back into the supportive arms and adoring gaze of Cohen.

All of the other supporting players are thinly written sketches, but Julie Walters and Jim Broadbent do their best to give them some fiery life. Walters, in particular, manages to make her mother hen into something entertaining, while Broadbent is fine, but sacked with a kindly priest taking on a paternal figure in Eilis’ life. We’ve seen these types many times before, but these actors are so good at their craft they do wonders to make them feel like real(ish) people.

It may sound like I didn’t enjoy Brooklyn as much as I did, but I just found some of it slightly frustrating. But it’s a very lovely film, with two lead characters that are likable and believable in their attraction and desires, and beautifully acted from top-to-bottom. I suppose hearing that the film was the story of an immigrant in New York gave me impressions of where the film would go, and the film drifts towards those locations, but pulls back. No matter, Brooklyn is one fine piece of romantic movie-making.

It’s not a total wipeout, but the omission of its presence on the awards circuit, except for two performances, is not without reason. Steve Jobs is a unique piece of cinema, but I’m not entirely sold on it being a completely successful one. There’s plenty to admire here, and just as much to find frustrating.

All things go back to the script. Aaron Sorkin and his obsession with the Great Flawed Man, inevitably white, affluent, and something of a raging asshole with to pontificate ad nauseam, is felt strongly here. Sorkin has his fans, but I’ve never been huge fan of his work. I find him in love with his ponderous verbosity, and find this scripts have a tendency to chase their own tails unless a strong directorial presence is found to guide them into something else.

Steve Jobs is not that movie. Sorkin created a film with three very clear and pronounced acts, playing less like a film and more like a filmed stage play. We check in on the same small group of characters at three different product launches, each of which finds Jobs in full-on demanding, ego-centric son-of-a-bitch mode. Orbiting him are a group of characters far more sympathetic and engaging. Why did Joanna Hoffman, who by all accounts seems a smart, capable woman with a low tolerance for bullshit, take his abuse and act as his wrangler for so long? Steve Wozniak, Andy Hertzfeld, and Crisann Brennan were frequent targets of his abusive tirades and put downs, why do they so frequently return to his side?

None of these questions gets satisfactory answers, but Jobs gets an unearned third-act bit of sympathetic character development. There’s no meaningful engagement with Steve Jobs, the person, and instead we witness something of myth-building around someone who maybe didn’t quite deserve as much as he’s received. Like Wozniak calls him out on, Jobs wasn’t a creator, an engineer, couldn’t write code or program anything, he was a great marketing man, though, and a solid idea-man. But a tech genius? Well, the script would have you believing that, and that he additionally wasn’t such a bad guy. After all, his frequent dick-headed attempts to skirt custody and responsibility of his oldest daughter has to do with his pent-up daddy issues, which is just lazy writing on Sorkin’s part.

Even stranger is how relatively calm Danny Boyle’s direction feels. Normally a film-maker of tremendous energy, perhaps too much at times, and kinetic visuals, Steve Jobs is smothered in Great Man film tropes. Boyle’s direction often feels like it’s being steamrolled by Sorkin’s words, whereas the similar The Social Network had a director wrestling with the immense verbal passages into montages and other visuals that produced some energy. There’s not enough of that in Steve Jobs. The montages to catch us up on the passages of time between the three acts feel like Boyle’s signature style, but then it goes back to glossy, smartly dressed BBC television adaptation mode.

Well, at least the performances sing, loudly and clearly. Leading the entire thing is Michael Fassbender. Many actors have broken under the challenge of finding the rhythms and musculature of Sorkin’s dialog, but Fassbender breaks the dialog around him. He finds the current wave to ride on, and sails through the film. It’s a laudable performance, and the film only works as much as it does because of his lead. It’s hard to imagine any of the other, and numerous, actors rumored for the role in this part now.

Everyone else could be argued as a supporting player, and they’re all top-notch actors. Granted, Winslet’s weird accent (supposedly Polish mixed with some other things) wanders far too much, but her various tics and exasperations feel real and lived in. Seth Rogen is solid as Steve Wozniak, a casting choice that felt like an inevitability from the moment this film was announced. Michael Stuhlbarg and Jeff Daniels turn in solid variations on characters they could probably do in their sleep by this point. While the film garnered a Supporting Actress nomination, rightly so, it was for the wrong actress. Katherine Waterston’s beat-down ex-girlfriend and mother to his ignored daughter is the standout among the supporting players. Consistently returning with less screen time but more battled-scarred poetry, Waterston is one of the few players who loudly screams for Jobs to be held accountable for his actions. Naturally, she’s nowhere to be seen during the final confrontation between father and daughter.

Having no interest in actually confronting its subject matter, or holding him accountable, Steve Jobs is happy to instead play him as just misunderstood. Frankly, I think Jobs, and Sorkin, should have listened when Wozniak screams out in frustration that “You can be decent and gifted at the same time.” Pity no one listened to him. Jobs, as witnessed here, was a bit of an asshole, but the film constantly sides with him. And the less said about that surprisingly happy ending, complete with an eye-roll inducing nudge and wink about the iPod the better.

The Martian is a finely made piece of popcorn entertainment, but thinking about it as anything beyond that is a folly. It’s technical skill cannot be faulted, but its central performance and direction are lacking.

It’s clearly not a problem of the script, which sticks smart dialog into various characters, and plays realistically enough with the science to feel incredibly real. Its various twists and turns are handled well from a story-telling perspective, and smartly casts various actors, both movie stars and character types, in various roles to flesh out what isn’t on the page. Yet again, the technique is smart; it’s the execution that’s the problem.

Ridley Scott’s direction is antiseptic and impersonal. Scenes of high-tension feel deflated from the razor’s edge. We already know that everything will work out, and it feels more routine and mundane in these sequences. Strangely enough, the scenes of highest interest are the ones in which our stranded astronaut must plan his survival and logically think his way through it all. Scott’s attention to detail and spark in these scenes is missing in many of the action sequences, which dive into beautiful images but lack feeling.

Perhaps it’s also that Scott’s pacing is off throughout The Martian. At a bloated two hours and twenty minutes, the pacing goes weird at several points. A sense of monotony takes hold during the middle section as our hero figures out a problem, everything is going smoothly, then we just know something has to gone wrong, then an explosion kicks in, and science is used to solve that problem. Repeat until the climax. It becomes mechanical and unthinking, looping through these sequences again and again and again.

Perhaps a change in leading man would have helped matters. Movie stars come with baggage, and sometimes they’re the only way a studio will gamble on a project. I understand the casting of Matt Damon, but I never believed it was anything other than Matt Damon dropping monologues to the audience, growing a beard, and losing a weight. We know Damon won’t die, because he’s Matt Damon, and he comes loaded with a baggage. It removes some of the survivalist interest and tension from the film, effectively taking the wind out its sails. Damon does fine movie star work, but we’ve seen him dig deeper and do better work in films like The Departed or Good Will Hunting.

But looking at the glossy exteriors, the lovely special effects work, the solid costume design, and appealing cinematography, The Martian is a gigantic beast. I sometimes wonder how modern films would play out as silent films, and perhaps The Martian would work wonders as a silent film. It’s a lovely series of highly detailed images drifting by. I applaud the film for placing the foundations of it story on science, engineering, logic, and problem-solving, but a little poetry, awe, and wonder would have gone a long way to making The Martian something better.