Mission to Mars

MISSION TO MARS

Rating: D
It's a shame the TV show Mystery Science Theater 3000 is now defunct, because this movie would have made prime fodder for a skewering. Brian DePalma took the helm early on when the original director either walked out or got axed and the entire production moved north to Canada. (There's a joke in there somewhere about a movie set on a barren, desolate planet devoid of intelligent life being filmed in Canada, but you won't catch the Net-Monster making it.) Anyway, there's no telling how much of this mess is entirely DePalma's fault and how much he inherited, but it's safe to say the final product has "take the money and run" written all over it.

We sense we're in trouble from the opening scene, where the hyperactive camera darts in and out of conversations at a house party. It's obviously DePalma trying to duplicate the opening of his last film Snake Eyes, which also was filmed in one long take and received praise for it, but as usual the gimmick only succeeds in distracting us from what's being said. Another problem evident throughout the whole movie rears its head early on, in an overly expository conversation between Don Cheadle and Gary Sinise. Cheadle rattles off one fact after another about Sinise's life, which I presume Sinise would be fairly familiar with unless he'd just emerged from a two-year-long coma. Obviously, the whole purpose is to inform the audience about the background of Sinise's character, but there are much more eloquent ways of accomplishing this. One of the first things any screenwriter watches for is if the dialogue he or she is writing is too expository. The fact that much of the entire movie has this flaw leads me to believe the script was assembled in a hurry and the filmmakers simply didn't care.

Soon after Cheadle and his crew set down on Mars, they discover the planet's surface can really suck. When word of the disaster reaches Tim Robbins and the rest of the inhabitants of the local space station, they scan the planet's surface via remote satellite, and are horrified to make out the image of three freshly-dug graves. Since there were four members in Cheadle's crew, an onlooker exclaims that one person must still be alive. Whereupon another points out that the last to die would have no one to bury him. I swear I'm not making this up. Speaking of graves and the Martian surface, were you aware Mars had clouds in its sky? Presumably, they have rain then, too, which means the filmmakers missed a golden opportunity to have it be raining when the characters later go to view the graves in person.

The saving grace of this movie could have been its production design, which is actually quite striking. But somewhere along the line homage turns into thievery, and everything from the look of the space station to the astronauts' space suits is a direct rip-off of 2001: A Space Odyssey. There's even one scene between Tim Robbins and Connie Nielson dancing in zero gravity that could have been fun. It obviously was difficult to film, but they even manage to screw this one up by having the camera execute stomach-churning pitches and rolls throughout the sequence. Brian, baby, nail the camera down to the floor. Please.

Although many movies have been guilty of including product placements, Snake Eyes achieved some kind of twentieth-century high water mark for its particularly obnoxious use of them. But you'd think a movie set in outer space and on Mars would necessarily be free of such whoring, wouldn't you? Guess again. Among others, the Mars rover displays stickers plugging Kawasaki and Pennzoil. I almost expected the Martians to appear in Tommy Hilfiger space suits.

I'm not giving anything away by telling you our heroes discover that humanity's origins lie on Mars. I'm not giving anything away, that is, because the theatrical trailer blabbed it all over creation first. But I have to admit the premise is not without its appeal. If you're going to endorse pure evolution by chance, as this film does, you've got to find a way to plug the huge hole in the theory represented by the Cambrian explosion. And I guess blaming it on Martians makes as much sense as anything else.