What do these movies have in common? Mission: Impossible, Raising Cain, The Untouchables, Body Double, Scarface, Blow Out, Dressed to Kill. I will give you one point if you said that they were all directed by Brian De Palma. I will pour you a shot of Lagavulin scotch if you added that they are stylish movies impaired by script problems. Brian De Palma’s latest film, Mission to Mars, does not even qualify for that list. This time, we have all the script problems delivered with little of the usual Brian De Palma flair.
In 2020, Luke Graham (Don Cheadle) leads a team of astronauts on a mission to Mars. Communication is lost after the team encounters a mysterious and deadly force. Two other commanders in the Mars program, Woody Blake (Tim Robbins) and Jim McConnell (Gary Sinise), head up a follow-up mission, to seek survivors and to investigate the mysterious catastrophe encountered by the first mission.
Mission to Mars is technically well crafted. De Palma delivers a number of his renowned long and fluid tracking shots, but most of the movie is delivered from an uninspired perspective. The interiors and exteriors the spacecraft, and the surface of Mars, are realized in fine detail, perfectly lit and look great. The many CG shots are creative.
What is sorely lacking is an original plot. If you have seen 2001, The Abyss, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, you have already experienced most of the science fiction contained in Mission to Mars. (If you think the action involving the astronauts floating around in space is original, check out Marooned from 1969.) If you are a real fan of SF novels and films, you are going to be squirming in your seat over the way that this movie treats even the most rudimentary of speculative ideas as though they were breathtaking insights.
Also lacking are interesting characters. We have husbands and wives who love one another and their kids, we have friends being loyal to their friends, and colleagues who respect one another. Ho hum. Nice in life, dull in a drama. Some terrific actors inhabit these characters, but the script gives them next to nothing to work with, resulting in a bunch of unremarkable performances.
Mission to Mars suffers from that common movie malady whereby its characters say such dumb things that the entire film loses credibility. One astronaut, who we are told did his Ph.D thesis on Mars colonization, transmits a message from the planet back to his mission colleagues. His team may have found a source of water, “which is the key to permanent human colonization of Mars”. Is such an expert going to make a wide-eyed declaration like this to his peers, all specialists in Mars colonization? Dumb remarks abound in this movie. A spacecraft might make it to Mars if they increase its fuel capacity, but it’s risky because they have “never modelled the ship’s behaviour under such high stresses.” Huh? Aren’t high stress behaviours the ones that do get modelled, to establish failure levels and modes? Not in this movie. Similarly, we learn that cold rebooting of the spacecraft’s systems was never tested before launch, because the test was too expensive!
While there are plenty more examples of this “dumb-dumbs in space” syndrome to choose from, I will cite only one more of special distinction. This is very likely the dumbest thing that I have ever heard a character in a movie say. Looking for evidence of the fate of the first mission of four astronauts, astronauts on the approaching rescue ship view an aerial image of three graves on Mars surface. One astronaut says to another, “that must mean that the fourth astronaut is still alive”. The other astronaut points out, no, it only means that there wasn’t a fifth to bury the fourth. This is all played totally straight. Honestly, if you were an astronaut, and someone on your crew said something that dumb, wouldn’t you be tempted to push him out an airlock before he jeopardized your survival? Moreover, what in the world was Brian De Palma’s purpose in keeping this dopey exchange in the movie?
Also annoying were the two product placements. Both were integrated reasonably well into the story. Nevertheless, when logos for consumer goods pop up prominently during a movie, it is always distracting, and all the more so when the setting is a publicly funded space mission that you would expect to be devoid of candy and soda pop logos. Their appearances caused me to lose focus on the movie and to wonder whether those logos would really be so unchanged in 2020.
Unless you’re a Brian De Palma groupie or really interested in CGI special effects, I cannot recommend Mission to Mars. I watched it with my 7-year-old son, which led to some enjoyable discussions about space, DNA and some other ideas from the movie. Watching it with your kid is one way to extract some pleasure out of watching this movie (but even that recommendation I must qualify: parental discretion is definitely required, as a couple of scenes are intense and violent.)
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