MISSION TO MARS
The first pro-creationism SF film?

  Well, I haven't seen an otherwise good movie shoot itself in the foot quite like this in...oh, a couple of weeks now.  The Ninth Gate was a fine film without any apparent third act; Mission To Mars is a middling film because its third act is overwhelmingly cheesy.  I recommended The Ninth Gate; it pains me to fail to recommend this movie, which has so much going for it, but I guess such a cheesy conclusion can be worse than none at all.

The year is 2020, and I don't know what NASA expects to find when they get to Mars, but that's where they're going.  A four-man (well, three-man one-woman) team heads on up there, led by the unfortunately named Luke (Don Cheadle), for a one-year mission on the surface (which seems a lot more promising than the five-minute mission headed by the crew of the last Mars mission I can remember in the movies, Species 2).  What they find is ice where there shouldn't be any, and when they investigate further, they wish they hadn't.  (Death by high-speed rotation!  Ouch!  Lookit them body parts fly!)  So after a panicked, garbled transmission from Luke, another mission is hurriedly planned to rescue the survivors, if any, and (more importantly) figure out what the hell went on, and to unlock what one character later refers to as "the secret" to this fairly convincing evidence of intelligent activity.

M2M manages to factor surface-obliterating sandstorms, catastrophic meteor impacts, whirlwinds that look like big uncircumcised penises, sudden decompression, slow decompression, all sorts of neat-o zero-G stuff, and yes, The Face On Mars.  Kitchen-sink sci-fi, maybe, but for most of its length, it's suspenseful and reasonably smart.  Director Brian DePalma has never before tried anything remotely like this, and his work is more success than failure, which is more than can be said of his last movie.

What helps this movie enormously is the appearance that those who worked on it graduated from grade nine at the very least.  The last film I can think of that dealt with present or near-future space travel was Armageddon, which was so insultingly stupid that next to it, virtually anything's gonna look like 2001 whether it intends to or not.  The makers of M2M (particularly the homage-happy DePalma, I have no doubt) leave little doubt as to their intentions; everything from the space helmets to the trips around the inside of a spinning-wheel space station bring Kubrick's film prominently to mind.  (frankly, I don't even remember if there was sound in outer space in this one -  spaceships will always go WHOOSH when they fly by in the movies, and I don't mind, but it's pretty neat when they don't)

Also, you've got to admire the breathtaking landscapes of Mars; it's been what, ten years since any movies spent any significant amount of time there (Species 2 doesn't count)?  How much of this is desert footage (with optic tweaking) and how much is straight out of somebody's computer, I don't know, but it's a great pleasure to behold.  Cinematography by longtime DePalma favorite Stephen H. Burum goes no small ways toward this.

The score by Ennio Morricone is a little subpar for him; thumping bass and keyboard during the "spacewalk" scene, for example, feels out of place for reasons I can't really put a finger on, and the main theme, while good, feels like it belongs in a fluffier movie.  Still, subpar Morricone is pretty good.  (note: the trailers played Vangelis's delightful "Conquest of Paradise" from 1492: Conquest Of Paradise, which made the trailer infinitely more enjoyable than if, say, Hans Zimmer's "Roll Tide" - which would've been used in 9 out of 10 other trailers with the same themes - was used.)

The thriller aspects are handled fairly well for the bulk of the film; particularly tense (with a strong payoff too) is one scene where more-or-less adrift astronauts need to grab hold of a passing space vehicle, and of course the frightening FX sequence early on where the first batch of astronauts are, uh, dealt with.  Momentum builds nicely, and ideas build on each other, which is pretty cool because most movies with a lot of ideas just kind of toss them in separately.

All this looks fine until the solution to "the secret" presents itself, and the answer is so cheesy, so belabored with pointing out of the obvious, so "square" in its earnestness that it's Saying Something Deep, I felt like I was watching an episode of, uh, Seaquest.  The introduction of a hokey CGI character (weeping a tear of grief in one awful moment) is sure to make eyes roll; that it's here is bad enough, but we've all seen so much of that generic "Gray" form in movies and TV that using it feels like somebody just ran out of ideas.  I appreciated the earnestness, especially in this day and age where a perfectly useful and enjoyable thing like irony's been beaten bloody into the ground with overuse, but nothing new is being said, and Mama Gray is just unforgiveable.

There are other problems, like the spotty cast in terms of both acting (I think I've had enough of Gary Sinise for a while) and characters (this movie makes a good case for not pairing married couples on life-or-death missions), and even little things like their names.  That one of the guys is named Woody inevitably got a giggle from me, making me wonder when one of the astronauts would reveal having had the childhood nickname of Buzz Lightyear.  But c'mon, one of these guys is named Luke, and that ain't a good idea, especially when Sinise keeps trying to go for a Han Solo thing (at the end of the picnic that opens the movie, in similar circumstances to Skywalker's departure to do battle with the Death Star, he says "Hey Luke," and I expected him to say "May the Force be with you!".  Later, he says "That was no earthquake" in exactly the same way Solo said "This is no cave" upon his escape from the space slug).

So no, I'm sorry to say, I can't recommend Mission To Mars, which has a lot of excellent FX with, for once, some thought into the cine-physical reality they inhabit.  That's something special; Deep Impact wasn't bad in this regard, but other than that, I can't even think of any other recent movies which really made an effort at this.  But the payoff in this movie just blows it.  If the movie had ended with the entrance to the white room, I'd still be disappointed, but you'd be getting a disappointed recommendation from me.  As it is, you've been warned.

Oh yeah, that subject header.  Some spoilage here, but nothing that you can't figure out from the ads. (actually, virtually the entire film can be figured out from the ads)  What we see is a visual representation of evolution on our planet, from single-celled organisms right on up to humanity...and yet, this representation is recorded looooong before the fact.  Either this was just a poor understanding of how evolution works (misinterpreting the concept as a genetic plan instead of a response to environmental conditions), or it's actually trying to sell a form of creationism to us.  How often do you see THAT in a movie, eh?

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