There’s a scene in American Sniper where Bradley Cooper’s character, with complete sincerity, says that America is the greatest country in the world. As if the worth of countries can be quantified and as if America would be anywhere near the top if they could.

I feel that there’s a complete lack of objectivity in American Sniper. Clint Eastwood obviously feels that Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper) is a great guy when his actions constantly suggest he’s anything but. From kicking down the doors of Iraqis, intimidating men, women and children, and beating up people in their own homes, he’s a reprehensible human being whose cowboy instincts are never used to help the Iraqi people but to perpetuate this mistaken idea of American exceptionalism.

In numerous scenes the American soldiers refer to the idigenous population as ‘savages’. I fully believe that soldiers talk this way, but I never felt that Eastwood was being objective. I feel that he, like the American characters in the movie, feel that they are somehow above the native population. Here the Americans are, rolling into Iraq to save everyone from themselves and their fucked up country, and what gratitude do they show? They don’t evacuate their homes when they’re supposed to and they even try and arm themselves against the invaders. What ingrates.

There’s no attempt here at any complexity. Chris Kyle is portrayed as a serious, committed soldier and the Iraqis are just cannon fodder. They even create a shadowy Syrian sniper counterpart called ‘The Butcher’ who slays people in cold blood and who is just generally filled with misplaced rage. He must be stopped of course by our heroic white hat.

One of the opening scenes has our hero hunting deer with his daddy as a child. Nevermind that Chris has taken his first life, his daddy chides him for not looking after his gun properly. Contrast this to an equivalent scene in Last of the Mohicans where the Native American characters hunt a deer and then give thanks to it after they kill it. They realize the enormity of what they’ve done and the sacrifice that has been made. Chris Kyle’s daddy is just concerned that Chris isn’t looking after his penis extension.

The end of the movie is basically a fantastical ‘my gun is better than your gun’ and ‘my dick is bigger than your dick’ showdown between Chris Kyle and the dastardly Butcher. Of course our hero triumphs with an impossible shot from about a mile away because he’s an American with a massive gun/penis and the other guy is just a little savage with a limp noodle.

The film makes an attempt to acknowledge the difficulties that Chris Kyle had adjusting to civilian life. He can’t concentrate at home when he has to hold his baby (which uncannily resembles a lifeless doll) and a BBQ turns into a nightmare when he almost beats a dog to death. Even in his PTSD he’s a complete asshole.

But then he discovers the joys of helping veterans. By talking to them, you say? Of course not. He helps them by shooting big guns at target ranges.

One of the most risible scenes is when Chris Kyle, who has now got his mojo back, sneaks up on his wife in full cowboy attire and draws a gun on her and makes out like he’s going to force himself on her. So sexy. You get it? The big, shiny six-shooter is his penis. Get it? Nevermind that he’s killed men, women and children with his rifle, isn’t it so sexy to fetishise guns?

The most jarring thing about the movie is how it ends. Kyle is happy and smiley and fully recovered and helping veterans and trying to pretend to rape his wife as a sexy cowboy when he gives a lift to a shifty looking fellow. A title then appears on the screen saying that the man murdered Chris Kyle. No attempt at all to depict this event or explain it. Our white hat just gets murdered.

And then you have the titles. Good Lord Almighty, you’d think that Oskar Schindler had died. American flags flutter and thousands of people line the streets to salute the paid murderer. It just goes to show that America is still deeply, painfully, worryingly and unabashedly in love with their frontier bullshit, their cowboy mythology and that most American of symbols: the gun.

I’m pretty sure that the backlash has already begun. Joker arrived on a wave of critical praise, even managing to win the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. But even now there are rumblings that it isn’t very good. Blah blah incels. Blah blah Scorsese rip-off. Blah blah Joaquim’s a ham.

First of all, as regards the incel stuff. Thank fucking Christ this isn’t some pro-incel nonsense. Well, for the most part. For the majority of the movie this is just a sad, sorry tale of a mentally ill man steadily losing the plot. There’s no outrage that women aren’t throwing themselves at him. He’s just losing his mind.

The only reason that I say that it mostly avoids incel-type nonsense is that there’s a scene near the end where the Joker/Arthur Fleck becomes a bit whinny. He goes on a late night TV show with Robert De Niro’s talk show host and complains about how people aren’t nice. He also confesses to some earlier murders. It’s a terribly written scene; easily the worst in the movie. Which is kind of a big deal when this is the Joker’s first big scene.

Everything about it feels wrong. De Niro’s character hardly bats an eyelid when the Joker confesses to murder, the TV show stays on the air for way too long while De Niro pompously lectures a killer and the Joker doesn’t sound like the Joker at all. It’s like it’s still Arthur Fleck talking but in drag. Which I suppose could kind of be the point. But the dialogue is still awful and self-pitying, something which the Joker usually isn't. I kind of wish that the Joker would have come on the TV show and not spoken a word; just sat there for a while and then shot De Niro’s character in the head before laughing hysterically like it’s the funniest joke in the world.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, the movie’s best scene is when we first get a glimpse of what’s to become the Joker. Arthur has lost his job as a clown for hire and attracts the attention of some Wall Street-type douchebags while riding home on the Subway. He’s still in his clown gear and they taunt him, beat him and humiliate him until, like Death Wish’s Paul Kersey, he blows two of them away with a concealed weapon. The last guy, like The French Connection, he chases off the train and shoots in the back. Arthur then flees the scene and disappears into a men’s bathroom. Here, wearing full clown make-up, he outstretches his arms and gazes at himself in the mirror, finding liberation in his violent madness. It’s a beautifully poetic scene; a lunatic finally finding himself.

Another great scene is when a couple of ex-colleagues come to visit Arthur in his apartment. They’ve found out that his mother has died. One of his former colleagues is a man who gave him a gun; an action which inadvertently led to Arthur losing his job. The other guy is a little person. They find Arthur in ghostly white face (he’s dyed his hair green and is playing with his face paint). After a brief chat, Arthur brutally and hideously attacks the man who gave him the gun, stabbing him repeatedly and smashing his head into the wall. The little person can only look on in disbelief. Eventually the man asks to leave, not knowing if he’s going to be murdered in turn. The scene is dripping with tension. Arthur then says that he can go. With great relief, the little person goes to exit the apartment. However, there are chains on the door and he can’t reach. He then has to ask Arthur to help him out. You’re never quite sure what’s going to happen and it’s darkly comic to see the dwarf squirm so much in the face of madness.

Perhaps the most chilling scene, though, is when Arthur lets himself into a neighbour’s flat. It isn’t clear yet (although it’s pretty obvious if you’re paying attention) but Arthur has been imagining that he’s in a relationship with a woman named Sophie that he encounters in his apartment building’s elevator. They have a brief exchange and then we see them spending time together. Only they aren’t. It’s all in Arthur’s head. It’s very sad and pathetic but it feels like an incredibly real delusion. The fantasies that he has are exactly the kind of thing that lonely men come up with. After killing the Wall Street guys, and still in full make-up and covered in blood, he imagines knocking on Sophie’s door and making out with her. What woman would do that? And the mother of a small child, no less. As always with these types of things, Arthur casts himself as the hero of his own nightmare.

So when Arthur turns up in Sophie’s flat, after having killed his mother (of course), there’s a palpable sense of dread. The casual way that he sits down and waits for her is rife with menace. And adding tension to the scene is the fact that, when he arrives, Sophie is putting her little daughter to bed.

What I liked so much about the film is that it’s more of a mood piece than anything else. The photography and music are fantastic. Some of the visuals are breathtaking - the Joker running through the tunnel, the lighting as the Joker waits to come through the curtain on the TV show and even Arthur simply trudging through his neighbourhood. This is lightyears ahead of the bland, moribund stuff that Marvel are feeding us. Just watching Arthur get fired and then smash his head into a phone booth window had more pathos and gravity than the whole of Black Panther.

Which isn’t to say that this is a great movie. There are some glaring faults. Robert De Niro doesn’t quite convince as the TV host, Thomas Wayne is merely a Donald Trump-style douchebag and the movie fetishes the Joker character. Once his face is painted, he seems to move in nothing but slow motion and is constantly filmed leaning back, smoking a cigarette. The Joker is meant to be a fascinating character but he isn’t meant to be the epitome of cool. I get that the confidence, the smoking and the dancing is Arthur finally finding himself but there’s so little actual Joker in the movie and so much of it is filmed in slow-mo that it feels that the film loses a little perspective. Heath Ledger’s Joker was always fascinating and endlessly watchable but you didn’t feel that Nolan was identifying with him or trying to turn him into a symbol of cool.

Another fault I had with the film is that the Joker never really feels like the Joker. I always thought that the Joker was fiercely intelligent. Evil yes, but super smart. Arthur Fleck is a bit of a dolt. As he’s presented here, he wouldn’t be capable of planning anything. Perhaps that’s the point though? Todd Phillips has said that he didn’t want to make it certain whether Arthur is the true Joker or not. Perhaps Arthur inspires someone else to take on the mantle.

That being said, there’s a great scene where the Joker is ‘liberated’ from the police by a hoard of anti-capitalist protesters. They’ve picked him as their symbol, their representative. He has no fucking clue what’s going on but finds that he finally has an appreciative audience. Earlier on in the film he bombs horribly at a stand-up club and is then publicly mocked for it on De Niro’s TV show. But now everyone is cheering him. With blood on his face, he smears it over himself to make an even bigger smile. After all the false starts in the movie, is this his birth as the Joker?

I’m not sure how successful this film will be with audiences. When I went to see it, everyone seemed to trudge out in a stupor. But even though it has some serious flaws, I’m glad that a filmmaker and a studio has finally tried to do something different with a comic book movie. The Marvel films have become cinematic NyQuil, regularly putting me in a coma. Here we have a movie with an amazing central performance from Joaquin Phoenix that takes lots of lots of risks. Not everything pays off, and yes the movie is highly reminiscent of Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy, but give me this over The Avengers any day.

For someone who led such a colourful life as Freddie Mercury, Bohemian Rhapsody is a remarkably coy film. Everything is kind of kept at arm’s length - Mercury’s sexuality, his famous parties and his complicated love life. The stuff is there, on the surface at least, but we never delve into details. The film is much more interested in the band’s performances than it is in the mindsets of the members.

To be fair, the musical scenes are great. They’re superbly filmed and they’re full of energy. And we even get treated to the full Live Aid set. But it’s a beautiful decoration on a deeply unsatisfying cake. If I want to watch the Live Aid performance, I can just watch the original on You Tube. What I wanted here was to get into Freddie Mercury’s head, but I don’t think the film does a good job of that at all.

Also, it plays hard and fast with the truth. The film makes it seem like this is Freddie’s last hurrah. He gets diagnosed with HIV, has a tearful hug with his band members and then turns in the best performance of his life. The only problem is that, in reality, he was diagnosed with HIV two years after Live Aid. The cynical manipulation here is staggering. You even have the band members almost crying while they perform. ‘Oh look at brave Fred, giving it his all even though he’s on his last legs’ they say with their eyes.

Therefore this tremendous performance becomes like something out of Rocky. Freddie gets diagnosed with HIV two years early, struggles to perform in band practice and then trains his arse off. Everyone is shitting bricks on the day of, but when it comes to nut-cutting time, he sings like a mustachioed angel. Crowd goes wild. Credits roll. And then we get a brief bit of text saying that he died in the early nineties. However, we never actually see him ill (besides coughing up blood once or twice) because seeing that would be too painful and too complicated and would not sit well with this Disneyfied version of the man.

I also resent the subtext of the movie. Freddie Mercury here is portrayed as a sad loser pining after his ex-fiance. This is the reason that he decides to start having lavish parties. From what I’ve read he was indeed something of a lonely man. However, he also just liked having fun and seemed to have a good sense of humour. But this joy is never present. And it gets worryingly close to waving a moralistic finger:

‘See what I told you! If only you were sensible you wouldn’t have got the HIV! You had to go out and have ‘fun’. You had to have a ‘good time’. You couldn’t be happy with a girl. You had to have sex with a man [mouth puke]. There are consequences for that. AIDS! Having a good time got you AIDS!’

It gets dangerously close to Forrest Gump territory where the free-spirited liberal Jenny gets HIV because she won’t do what’s she’s fucking told. It can’t be that Freddie Mercury just had a hedonistic lifestyle with all the good things and bad things that go with that, and that HIV was just a horrible stroke of bad luck that nobody deserved and which no one had coming. No, he has to be fucking miserable and all the fun has to be drained out of his life.

It’s also just fucking weird how this film manages to erase all the sex and drugs out of Mercury’s life. Do we even see him kiss another man? I can’t seem to remember it. If it happens, it’s fleeting. It’s like the film thinks that I’m Mercury’s mother and it doesn’t want to show me the reality of his existence because I’d have a conniption. And the only drugs it seems to show him take are a few pills. He was doing more blow than Scarface! Is this to protect the wee little children who love that song where the guy sings and the people clap their hands and stomp their feet? Fuck those people! This film could have been more engaging, more moving, more uplifting and much funnier if we got all the gory details. Oh no, your dad’s favourite singer liked to snort coke and rim other men? Get over yourself.

These inaccuracies and omissions make me question the truth of pretty much everything in the film. Was Queen’s manager (played by the Irish driver out of Downton Abbey) really that villainous? Was the head of EMI really that much of a dunderhead (the comic stupidity of this character is really over the top)? Did Freddie Mercury really reconcile with his estranged father on the day of Live Aid and bring over a male ‘friend’? And was he even estranged from him in the first place? And did a bunch of fucking chickens really inspire the writing of Bohemian Rhapsody? Honestly, the production of Bohemian Rhapsody is a fucking travesty. Here the film makes Queen seem Spinal Tap. Everything about that sequence is just goofy as hell.

I also hate the opening section of the film. It’s woefully facile. In about ten minutes Freddie Mercury has an argument with his family, watches a student band, joins the band as the lead singer and embarks on a successful tour with them. For a film that’s so long, it’s in such an awful rush to say nothing.

So, besides the musical scenes, is there anything good about the film? Remi Malek gives a strong performance as Mercury, but that’s about it. The slick camerawork and weirdly perfect costumes that look like no one has even worn them, make the movie look like a waxwork museum. It’s a pretty miserable exercise. My suspicion, seeing as the band seemed to have so much control over this project, is that they have strangled all the life out of it; that any controversy has been swept under the rug to protect their ‘legacy’. This is the same band that were so concerned about their image and respecting Queen’s legacy that they hooked up with both Paul Rodgers and Adam Lambert to squeeze every penny out of its dead carcass. Bohemian Rhapsody seems like yet another cynical ploy to make even more money and mythologise the band - to turn them into something they never were. And baffling enough, they’re trying to turn them into a simpler, less interesting version of themselves.

If your fiance was murdered in front of you in a brutal terrorist attack, what would be a reasonable reaction? You’d certainly experience a prolonged period of grief. You’d probably suffer some serious PTSD. You might even abuse alcohol or drugs or even try and kill yourself.

But would you turn into a James Bond figure and try and take out entire terrorist cells single-handed? Yeah, that might be a stretch.

American Assassin could possibly work as some sort of incredibly over the top fantasy fulfillment flick. But instead it’s a boring, cliched, utterly joyless piece of sludge. People smash each other in the face and blood splatters all over the lens, but it’s neither hard hitting nor exhilarating.

I knew this film was in for a rough ride when Michael Keaton turned up and started being all...Michael Keaton. Don’t get me wrong, he’s a fine actor, but he can very easily descend into some lazy, annoying ticks. He has a default crazy mode that he can switch into if he’s not feeling very inspired, and he’s certainly lacking inspiration here.

Keaton’s character has the less than enviable task of turning some milk toast pissant, Jason Bourne wannabe into, er, Jason Bourne. Cue yelling, beating and various boot camp shenanigans. But Keaton’s character is neither Gunnery Sergeant Hartman nor Obi-Wan Kenobi. He just seems to be in a bit of a bad mood all the time, but for no real discernible reason. Maybe he can’t get decent coffee or maybe he rewatched Jack Frost. But no sooner has he started yelling at Baby Bourne than they’re traipsing over Europe.

The plot plays like Donald Trump’s wet dream. Some Iranians, pissed off with their government’s nuclear deal with the US, decide to secretly build their own nuclear bomb so that they can attack Israel. You see, Trump told us that it was a bad deal! Fucking Obama trying to stabilize shit. We should have preemptively nuked those fuckers in case they tried some shit later on down the line.

Complicating matters is the fact is that the building of the nuclear bomb is coordinated by another American assassin. And would you believe it, he’s an ex pupil of Michael Keaton.

This American assassin gone bad is made out to be like the fucking Darth Vader of assassins. He’s just too good but he’s evil as shit. But then he turns up and he’s just an annoying kid with daddy issues. Apparently Keaton’s character acted like this kid was the second coming or something. He bigged him up and inflated his ego. Somewhere along the line, though, things went bad and zzzzzzz....

Oh no, was it a hard job killing people for a living? Was it not quite as easy as it seemed? Now that’s a surprise. But yes, take all of your bitterness and help to create a nuclear bomb. Oh, and then betray your Iranian colleagues and steal the nuclear bomb and attack the American Navy because you have issues with your surrogate daddy! Seriously, what complete and utter garbage this movie is.

The final action scene, I shit you not, involves the new baby Bourne assassin fighting baby Darth Vader in a speedboat as a nuclear bomb ticks down. The tension! The drama! It’s like the end of Face/Off except completely devoid of entertainment.

There’s a hilarious moment, after baby Bourne kills baby Vader, where the kid is alone in a speedboat with the nuclear bomb. ‘What do I do? What do I do?’ It’s like the modern equivalent of those silent movies with the big, round bombs and the fuse burning down. ‘Where do I throw it? Who can I give it to?’ Except it’s a nuke.

Before I go any further, I should mention the fact that there’s a scene where Michael Keaton gets tortured. He has his fingernails ripped off, he gets electrocuted and he gets sliced. And yet he tells baby Vader how much he likes it. Baby Vader almost looks like he’s about to start crying. How am I supposed to take this kid seriously as a threat when he can’t even torture someone properly? And Michael Keaton just Michael Keaton’s his arse off. There he is with no fingernails and yet he looks like he’s having the time of his life. He even manages to sucker the stupid ex pupil and bites piece of his ear off. And yet baby Vader doesn’t kill him. He wants Keaton to witness his master plan. His attack on the US Navy. He’s doing all of this so that he can make Keaton feel bad! It’s the stupidest motivation I’ve seen in a long time. ‘I’m going to torture you...but not kill you. And I’ll going to nuke the US Navy and kill myself...and you’ll feel really bad. Fuck you dad!!!’

And it’s in this post torture state that Keaton begins dangling out the side of a helicopter, yelling at his protege to drop the nuke in the ocean. Which at least stops the absolute ridiculousness of the kid trying to find a place to put the bomb. ‘Maybe if I shove it in the toilet and close the door, everything will be okay!’

So the kid gets airlifted out of the blast radius and the bomb explodes underwater which makes the CGI US Navy wobble a lot. But just when you think it’s all over, there’s the hint that the filmmakers are fishing for a sequel and an inevitable franchise. Quick, let me do a Michael Keaton like in the above screencap.

George Clooney’s directing career is following a depressing downward trajectory. After the early promise of Confessions of a Dangerous Mind and Good Night, and Good Luck, he’s produced a steady stream of mildly entertaining but ultimately disappointing movies (The Ides of March being the most notable example). But with Surburbicon he produces his first outright dud.

Based on a Coen brothers script, this ill-conceived, mean-spirited, nonsensical movie doesn’t really work on any level. It looks great, but the characters are universally repugnant and stupid, and the storytelling is atrocious. Most of the movie makes very little sense.

It’s probably the character’s overwhelming stupidity that bothered me the most (much more so than how despicable everyone is). The central character, Gardner Lodge (Matt Damon), hires a bunch of criminals to murder his wife so that he can cash in her life insurance. However, he seems completely ill-prepared for the investigation that is bound to follow. You’d think, given the nature of the crime, that he’d have his story worked out. And seeing as he also has a partner in crime, you’d think that person would be prepared as well. But no, they act like imbeciles and immediately rouse suspicion. Someone might know, or think they know, that you’ve done something, but being able to prove it is everything.

In one scene the insurance investigator says that he knows that Gardner murdered his wife. Now the investigator might think he knows this or he might simply be fishing. A stupid person will fall for this tactic and immediately give themselves away, which is what Gardner does. Amazingly, he admits to the murder. You’ve immediately painted yourself into a corner. You’re either going to jail or you’ve got to kill someone else. Gardner decides on the latter. Again, the stupidity here is too much. You’re now going to kill an insurance investigator? You’ve immediately made sure you’re going to jail.

The murder of Oscar Isaac’s insurance investigator tries to straddle that familiar funny/disturbing Coen brothers line, but Clooney is incapable of performing this high wire act. The yowling from Isaac as he realises he’s been poisoned is ridiculous in the extreme - it’s like it’s from a Looney Tunes cartoon. And then the sound effects as Garnder tries to remove a poker from the investigator’s head - there’s lots of crunching and swishing - are just confusing. Is this supposed to be a funny moment? A disturbing moment? I get the grim detail of having the poker get stuck in the guy’s head - in the world of movies, deaths are usually very clean - but I just don’t get the swishing noise. It suggests to me that Clooney is trying to make this darkly funny, when instead it should have been the moment when the gravity of events finally hits home.

Oh, did I mention that the murder of the insurance investigator happens in the middle of the street? Yes, it’s at night, but still. Lots of running and yelling and yowling and bashing and swishing in the middle of the street? I don’t know about you, but my mother would have sniffed that out like a rat and shot to the window like a dart. And what about all the blood that would have been all over the road? Ah, whatever.

I guess one of the reasons that a heinous crime like this can go undetected is because a large portion of the town is distracted by racially abusing a black family in the house next to Matt Damon’s character. The narrative worth of this side story is non-existent because the family is given no screen time and hardly any lines. It’s one of the weirdest frames for a movie I’ve seen. If you’re not going to invest anything in these characters, what’s the point? What, you’re trying to make a point that suburbia is rotten to the core? That behind the civilised exterior lies greed and barbarity? Yeah, you’re already illustrating that with the main story.

Or do you have this frame because you want to indulge in some cute bookending? At the start of the movie there’s a town meeting where incensed locals say that they don’t want a black family in their community. They’re not ready to integrate, they argue, and it’ll lead to the ruin of the town. And then at the end an old lady, talking to some reporters, says that everything used to be normal before the black family moved in.

I can feel the poker hitting me in the head. ‘You see what I’m saying?’ Clooney yells. ‘It wasn’t the family. Everything has been screwed up from the beginning.’ Yes, yes, George. I get it.

The Girl on the Train was a terrible book and now it’s been made into a terrible film. Now don’t get me wrong, there was always the kernel of a good idea within Paula Hawkins’ turd of a novel. A voyeur on a train gets embroiled in a murder mystery (it’s like Rear Window...with wheels!). But the story is so melodramatic, the characters so annoying and unlikeable, and the twists and turns so predictable and mundane, that it’s a wasted exercise. Had the filmmakers been serious about making a decent film they should have thrown the book out of a moving train. Just take the basic premise and do your own thing.

The changes that have been made are cosmetic and end up hurting the movie. The book is set in and around suburban London. The movie is set in and around suburban New York. The filmmakers have instantly made things harder for themselves. The idea is that a woman on a train becomes obsessed with a couple she sees out of the window. In the London area this is just about plausible. On my old commuter line it would seem like you were going through people’s back gardens. But in upstate New York the houses are much farther away. There’s much more space. You’d need binocular vision to be able to see anything going on.

So I was immediately calling bullshit on the whole thing. There’s no way this woman could see what was going on inside these houses. Especially when she’s pissed out of her head most of the time. In one particularly egregious moment, she even sees a couple taking a selfie while they were inside their house. It was completely laughable.

The casting too is all wrong. In the book Rachel is worn out and overweight because of years of drinking. In the movie she’s played by Emily Blunt, who, like most young actresses, is thin as a rake. She tries her best to look haggard and shitty, but she doesn’t look like she’s had a hard life. She just looks tired.

Another poor piece of casting is the girl who plays Megan Hipwell. Megan is supposed to be this super sexy young woman that all of the women are jealous of and all the men want to fuck. But the actress here looks like she’s about 15. She pouts and she sulks, but she’s not remotely interesting. And it’s not like she’s super curvaceous to make up for the complete lack of personality. She’s an average blonde girl, the likes of which are two a penny in New York. So the fact that three different men go bananas over this woman boggles the mind.

Megan even manages to bewitch her therapist. At one point, like something out of a telenovela, he starts screaming in Spanish about her driving him out of his mind while she does some dopey shit like squinting in the sunlight and rubbing herself.

I also found it hilarious that they cast a Venezuelan actor in the therapist role. The therapist’s name is Kamal Abdic. I was kind of expecting a Middle Eastern actor, not a Spanish speaker. Seriously, it you really wanted this actor playing the role, why not change the name? It’s just too jarring. I kept thinking to myself, ‘How is this guy named Kamal?’ Now I’m sure that some fans of the book (poor, sad people) would bristle at the idea of changing Kamal’s name, but this is hardly Dickens, is it? Change whatever you like.

Now because Megan is oversexed and because this is a thriller, she dies a horrible, violent death. You see, not only is she married to a jealous beefcake who has skin so red that he must constantly be slapping himself, and not only is she fucking her therapist, but she also has something going on with Rachel’s ex-husband. They fuck in the woods up against the poor humiliated trees and everything is oh so hot and sexy...until he bashes her brains in with a rock. The murder is actually pretty tough to watch but, really...who cares? All of these people are irremediably shallow and annoying.

My least favourite character is Anna. She’s married to Rachel’s ex-husband and lives in Rachel’s old house. She’s also Megan’s employer, as Megan has a job there as a nanny. At the beginning Anna says that being a mother is the most important job in the world. This despite the fact that she has a full-time nanny to look after her kid while she goes to the Farmer’s Market. Apparently the wee little kid, like any good suburban baby, has allergies and can’t subsist on peasant food. She needs the good stuff. The natural stuff. And apparently she’s too good to get in a car with her mother or on a bus. Fucking suburban assholes who have the luxury of dumping their kid on paid staff. Anyone else would have to drag their kid along everywhere or give them to granny or grandpa.

Sudden brainwave. Why doesn’t Anna just order all of this fancy food online? That way she could spend more time worrying about vaccines and researching delicious cake recipes that don’t have sugar or flour amongst the ingredients.

At least Megan has the right idea and says that she doesn’t want to spend the rest of her life changing diapers or doing laundry. What she wants is cock. Lots and lots of cock. Which is why she has to die and drive the plot of this idiotic film.

In the book, when Rachel finally gets embroiled in the murder mystery, you at least get the sense that she’s on some kind of mission. There’s some sort of purpose and some sort of narrative drive. But here the film just drags its way to the feeble, Hallmark-level conclusion.

I kind of feel like there’s an excellent Shannon Tweed movie hiding here. But as a big budget thriller, it’s an embarrassment. The direction, in particular, is dreadful and makes it seem like the filmmaker is barely sentient. Every single choice is the wrong one. Somewhere Hitchcock is laughing his ass off.

What was it with the Oscars last year? First Mad Max and now this. Was there a massive shortfall in quality in 2015?

Like Mad Max, The Martian is an entertaining film, but it’s pure fluff. It deserves to make money but it doesn’t deserve to win awards. It’s likeable, it’s well made but it’s completely shallow.

It also suffers terribly in comparison to the recently nominated Gravity. Gravity was also a tale of survival in space, but it had more weight to it. It was more visceral, it had more imagination and a lot more emotion. This, in comparison, is a trifle, even if the fate of the central character is potentially a lot worse than that of Sandra Bullock.

Mark Watney (Matt Damon) is one of a group of astronauts exploring Mars. The expedition’s base is hit by a massive dust storm and the commander gives the order to evacuate. During the evacuation Watney is hit by debris and presumed dead.

Only, he’s not.

Watney is now stranded alone on Mars. With his crew beginning the long voyage back to Earth and with another crew not arriving on Mars for another four years, he has to find a way to survive for almost half a decade with a limited amount of supplies. As he says. he’s going to have to ‘science the shit out of it’.

There’s a lot of joy to be had in Watney’s simple, mundane day-to-day routines. The rationing of food, trips outside to gaze at the Martian landscape and the recording of his video diary. But once the movie begins to open up and expands beyond the narrow focus of Watney’s isolation, it becomes less interesting. The struggles of NASA to get their man/men back home safely was much more effectively depicted in Apollo 13.

I don’t think the casting helps that much. Kristen Wiig is completely out of place and Sean Bean stands out like a sore thumb. Why is a man with strong Northern English accent the mission controller at NASA? Plus, every time I see him now I’m waiting for his inevitable death scene.

Jeff Daniels, too, as the NASA administrator fails to convince. But maybe that’s my fault. For me he’ll always be Harry from Dumb and Dumber.

There’s also a serious issue with the tone of this film. One of the running gags is that Mark gets stuck on Mars with nothing but crappy disco tunes to listen to. It’s meant to add levity to the movie but for me it completely robs it of dramatic weight. Fucking ‘Hot Stuff’, ‘Love Boat’ and ‘Rock the Boat’ all make an appearance. Still, it could be worse. It could be Kanye West he gets stuck with.

But I feel that this movie should have been stripped back completely. I’d want to remove the rescue mission entirely. I’d want to see everything from Watney’s perspective. His isolation should be palpable and absolute. We should only be relieved of his loneliness when he is. We should see the rescue mission when he sees the rescue mission. For a film where there’s so much at stake, there’s very little sense of jeopardy.

Even when Watney blows up his base and destroys his crop of potatoes, it doesn’t feel like the end of the world. And it should. It should be utterly crushing. It should be like that scene in Touching the Void when he falls into the crevasse and is positive that he’s going to die. It’s emotional armageddon. But here it’s a blip. It’s an inconvenience. Because you know that the NASA guys are going to speed up their rescue mission and they’re going to save him at the last moment.

And the actual rescue is preposterous. The movie does a decent job of building up the tension for Watney’s take off from Mars. He has to strip the take off vehicle of all its weight, which includes removing the windows and replacing it with a tarp, but then the final rescue just involves too much action movie nonsense.

Watney’s vehicle and the rescue vehicle are moving at completely different velocities, so a bomb is rigged and exploded, the Captain goes out on a teether to ‘catch’ Watney and he has to stab his spacesuit to provide propulsion so that he can bridge the gap between him and her. It’s really silly and not at all believable.

Kind of like the film itself. It might have a NASA advisor making sure that everything is kind of possibly, just about feasible, but we all know it’s bullshit. Entertaining bullshit. But bullshit. And certainly too facile to be remembered in the long run. There’s more weight and more gravitas in ten seconds of Alien than there is in this.