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Mission To Mars (2000)
Review by Jeff
Godemann
The movie opens at a farewell barbecue for our intrepid space explorers in
the year 2020 (you can tell it's the future because of the high-tech car
and funny-looking Dr. Pepper bottles). There we are introduced to all the
characters and find out all the nauseating little details about their
lives. Yeah, so Gary Sinise's character lost his wife and Tim Robbins'
character and his wife are going along and there's the single guy and...oh,
for pete's sake, folks. It's bad enough to cram this human interest/character
development crap into a supposed sci-fi/suspense flick in the first place, but
when it's stupid, clichèd, doesn't make me care about the characters, and
doesn't even help the story out...oh, wait. One cannot help that which is not
there. My bad.
So dissolve to the surface of Mars as our first group of four explorers (of
which only one is a known actor, so you know the other three are in trouble)
pick up indications of water. Water, for those of you in Rio Linda, is the key
to permanent human colonization on Mars, so everyone's pretty excited. So they
go check it out, interrogate a mountain with a radar gun, and next thing you
know the wind is picking up and a tornado seemingly whipped up by the god of war
himself shreds the team. Naturally, one survives (I'll let you guess who) and
sends a distorted message back to Earth.
So dissolve to the "World Space Station," where a rescue mission is
planned and we have some more gratuitous drama and character stuff with really
bad dialogue. Please, get me Tom Servo, Crow, and
Mike. Now.
So dissolve once again to the rescue mission, just short of Mars orbital
insertion. There actually are a couple of good scenes here. One is a touching
zero-G dance lesson between the husband and wife members of the crew. The other
is a tense repair mission following a micrometeorite impact.
Oh, as if you couldn't guess, something else goes wrong (NASA can't even
win stuff in the movies, for cryin' out loud), and the crew is forced to
improvise, losing one of their own in the process.
So now they're back on the surface. One gratuitous flag-planting later,
the Mars-happy survivor is found and we work our way to the preposterous
and incredibly lame ending dealing with the origin of life on Earth. Good
grief, I can forgive a sucky movie quite a bit if it has a good ending.
But when it sucks and has a bad ending...well, it means I won't even rent
it on video.
Um, I don't get it. What just happened? Huh? That was stupid.
Such were the thoughts going through my mind as I exited the theater
following a viewing of Mission To Mars, the new sci-fi flick
directed by Brian de Palma, veteran of such sci-fi classics as...ummm...well,
this sure isn't one.
Last summer was the summer of computer-altered reality flicks. The summer
before that it was asteroid-threatens-planet. This summer, the hot film
topic is Mars, due I'm sure in no small part to the publicity of NASA's
recent unmanned missions.
Thanks to an overabundance of hype (attributable largely to the Sci-Fi
Channel, which ran those silly "sci-fi news" updates during every
commercial break of the Indiana Jones movies), I decided to go
take in this new flick. It looked interesting enough in the previews, even
though, once again, 90% of the movie's plot and 30% of the cool special effects
were given away in 30 seconds. Come to think of it, I guess I should've taken
that as a warning sign.
On to some minor observations:
- NASA is now allowing filmmakers to shoot the NASA logo and get their
technical assistance. Too bad they didn't exercise a bit of quality
control for the script as well.
- Technically, the film seemed fairly accurate. The èWorld Space
Stationè sets were some of the highlights of the movie and looked like
logical extensions of the Spacelab modules we've been sending up in the back of
the space shuttle in recent years. Beyond that, though, suspend your disbelief.
- Okay, if this mission was an international effort (judging by the
presence of a Russian on the first crew), then why did we only see NASA's
logo on everything?
- And what was with the Penzoil label on the Mars Rover? What the heck was
going on? Was NASCAR planning to hold the Cydonia 400 there next year?
- And why was the American flag the only one flying on Mars? Did we get
fed up with our international partners and say, "Listen, if the USA is
footing 90% of the bill and providing 75% of the technology, then by golly
it's gonna be Old Glory flapping in the Martian breeze!"?
- Clichè, clichè, clichè. Pick your favorite sci-fi
movie and you'll pick up on an homage in this flick. Cheesy, cheesy, cheesy.
- Did I mention that the ending sucked?
- Oh, and at the risk of spoiling part of the movie, let me ask you this:
if your house burned down, and there was a perfectly nice house right
across the street, would you move there or would you move to Japan? And
would you leave your family photo album in that house across the street
before moving to Japan?
So, in summary, Mission To Mars is a jumbled mess of a whole
lot of stuff that doesn't really make much sense in the end. Avoid at all
costs. A crumbly one and a half microscopic fossil-bearing Mars meteorites out
of five.
- screenplay by
- directed by
- music by
- Cast:
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