The Martian (2015)

I had pretty high hopes going into this movie, as I loved reading the book. While it struggled to deal with some of the problems that adapting a book can be, it did not disappoint in the slightest. It stayed very true to the source material, only diverging at the end to increase suspense and then create a more fulfilling conclusion. A lot of the book is Watney journaling about how he has a problem, has no idea how to fix it, then figures out how to solve it. This makes telling his story in a cinematic way difficult; you don't want to see a character writing everything down and just listening to him narrate. The solution was to sometimes show him thinking and figuring things out, and other times for him to address his problems to a camera. The latter worked better, as some of the quiet/thinking scenes may have been hard to follow for those who had not read the book. I would have liked to see him start out addressing the camera with what he has to do, then transition that audio to voiceover while he actually does the work. That said, the pacing never too slow to me. One thing I didn't like was the overly obvious use of body doubles when Watney loses weight near the end. You see Watney come out with a towel over his head, probably 50+ pounds lighter than before. Later, he puts on the space suit, which looks just as filled out. However, the overall movie was still powerful. It is hard for me to look at space movies in an unbiased way because I love the subject so much, but this one didn't seem to hit too many cliches. I also loved how it showed the entire world pulling together and rooting for one man to survive--showing how the world comes together in space, how we are not separate countries but an individual human race. Beautiful. AND THEY FOUND WATER ON MARS. What a time to be alive, people. Go see The Martian and encourage kids to be interested in space!!

Apocalypse Now (1979)

#28 on the AFI 100. This is an epic movie. Two and half hours of suspense and character development with surprisingly little action for a Vietnam War movie. I don't think I would say this is the quintessential Vietnam movie; it focuses on one specific Special Ops soldier's journey. Movies like Platoon, which follow an average group of soldiers, seem to be more relatable. However. Apocalypse Now was so well made. Everything flowed and the long runtime did nothing to bore me--I would even love to see it longer. It is especially amazing that it was so great considering all of the issues it had during filming. You can read about those online, but the one that really irked me was that  Marlon Brando, arguably the greatest film actor of all time, showed up to set overweight without having read the script. The script had to be changed to suit his weight, and since he was paid by the day, he kept on prolonging the writing process. I have to give SOOO much credit to Coppola for not only working with Brando and dealing with the countless other problems this production faced, but doing so in a way that causes this movie to be one of the best ever made. Truly an inspiration.