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Isn't that a Sammy Hagar album title? No, wait, that's Marching to Mars (which, given his penchant for crotch-rock, could have just as easily been titled Emission to Mars). Okay, start again --
In case you haven't heard, the latest bandwagon every producer and his dog has jumped on is making movies about the fourth solar satellite, the one named after the Roman god of war. Boasting the first of this wave to reach theaters (discounting Tim Burton's mutant Mars Attacks, which didn't deserve to flounder so at the box office three years ago), Disney, under their Touchstone imprint, wins both the calendar race and the p.r. contest, having gotten NASA's full cooperation and technical advice in filming the project. But in the works are also Red Planet (starring Val Kilmer), Ghosts of Mars (directed by John Carpenter), The Martian Chronicles (scripted from his own stories by national treasure Ray Bradbury), and Princess of Mars (based on a novel by the guy who got the world reading pulp science fiction, Edgar Rice Burroughs).
My big question for Disney is, "Where is Brian DePalma and what have you done with him?" Considering the director's habitual homage to a certain deceased portly Englishman, I was expecting -- hoping for -- "Hitchcock in Space." But what we get is way more Mouse than mayhem.
It's the year 2020, and a crew of corporate-sponsored astronauts is headed for the first manned landing on Mars. International cooperation apparently isn't quite enough to fund the trip without major corporate sponsorship, however, since there are Pennzoil and Kawasaki stickers everywhere (unfortunately no electric motocross bikes jumping red sand dunes, dammit), as well as ample supplies of the two most important nutritional staples for interplanetary survival: Dr. Pepper, and of course Mars Inc.'s bestselling product, M&Ms. Everything goes okay until the intrepid quartet (led by Don Cheadle) gets down to the surface and sets out to explore The Face -- you know, that big thing that looks in photographs like a prop from the old Bangles video "Walk Like an Egyptian" -- setting off some sort of alien burglar alarm that activates a giant extraterrestrial vacuum cleaner and sucks them to oblivion.
But this is Disney, so a team calculated to attract a cross-section of moviegoing demographics (Jerry McConnell, Tim Robbins, Gary Sinise, and Soldier co-star Connie Nielsen) rockets to the rescue, only to run into the kind of obstacles they could have planned for if they'd only watched som sci-fi movies from the 1950s: meteors and cosmic storms (you'd think DePalma and Sinise would have given up on bad weather as a plot device after their so-so last outing together, Snake Eyes). But they prevail, after a fashion, and figure out that, to hotwire the alarm, they must solve an ancient puzzle that goes something like this:
q b k i s s
y h u m a n
o c z a s s
u d o o g s
r b y e t p
They figure it out, but for their trouble walk into a climax so Disneyesque (there's even an alien group hug), replete with un-freakin-believably sappy music from Ennio Morricone -- legendary composer of nearly 400 film scores, who ensured Clint Eastwood's immortality by writing his trademark "ooo-eee-ooo-eee-ooo" in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly -- that people were laughing.
And as final indignity to Sammy Hagar, he seems destined to be forgotten in the future, since NASA's official zero-G dance music is the David Lee Roth/Van Halen tune "Dance the Night Away." D+
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