Go See The Martian While It's Still in Theaters.
And Go See All is Lost on DVD When You're Done.

My hands are killing me.  I'm going to write more about that tomorrow or the next day. Don't worry.  I'm surviving and I'm in pretty good spirits.  Buy, as I'd started to say couple of days go there are two movies you really should see.  And this will be short. I saw The Martian starring Matt Damon (and he really does star) in Friday Harbor a few weeks ago.  I saw All is Lost with Robert Redford, a few months ago on DVD.  I'm sorry I missed it in the theaters, though I'm not sure it made it to Hawaii, which is ironic I guess.

Both of these movies are about an individual, solitary and beyond the help of human aid.  They're spare in narrative, and simple in palette, the silver gray of the ocean, the oxidized red of the Martian desert. There's no deus in or ex machina  here.  If these two men are to survive, they're going to have to figure it out on their own and they're going to have to execute their own salvation.  Redford's character is alone in the Indian Ocean on a small, increasingly incapacitated cruising sail boat.  Damon's is marooned at an abandoned station and disabled launch vehicle in the deserts of Mars.  There's very little dialogue in either, though internal monologues are either broadcast, or brilliantly--and entirely acted with facial and bodily expression--in All is Lost.

Obviously The Martian is more of a spectacle and is, in its way, a worthy sequel to 2013's Gravity--another epic of solitary problem solving.  But beyond special effects, the spectacle lies in watching Damon's self-deprecating, handsome-without-being-pretty face register every shadow of hope and every devastating, impossible set-back. It's elegantly acted in the midst of the inevitable entropy of all technological solutions to his challenge--to get back to earth before the last of his resources--internal and technological--fail.

Redford is sailing alone across the Indian ocean on his private boat when he encounters a storm that partially disables his vessel.  A sequence of misfortunes turn frustration into desperation into hopelessness and in the face of each, he recovers, reshapes his resources and stays under the heavens with increasing exposure and on top of the water.  His character--in his face and posture--register in another elegant, understated, but extremely subtle performance of an endless sequence of creative choices rather than the more typical simple alternatives.

In both narratives, the single, lone protagonist is heroic, at least in the fact of his own persistence and  solitary reliance on limited and diminishing resources. In All is Lost the poster tag-line is "Never give up."  In The Martian it's alternatively the slightly misleading "Help is only 140 million miles away." or "Bring him home."  In the end they have to get themselves home. The stories are both about just doing it. They're both riveting.