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Review: "Mission To Mars"
Review 1: Jamie and Michael
Michael: I don't want to keep you in suspense here: movies just don't get much worse than this. And I've seen both Waterworld and Attack of the Killer Tomatoes , so I think I know what I'm talking about. When Brian De Palma says on the movie's official site, "I tried to avoid all the cliches of science fiction movies and to give a whole new look and approach to this fantastic story," all I can think of is that someone needs to call the FBI because the movie he made was obviously switched with someone else's fifth or sixth-rate NYU-film-school production before it reached the theaters.
Jamie: People are going to say we're taking this too seriously, and maybe I did expect too much going in. But I really hate seeing wasted potential.
Michael: The whole premise of the film is based upon a scene where one astronaut makes a zero-gee sculpture of M&M (tm) brand chocolate candies rotating freely and circularly in the shape of a DNA helix. Newton's first law? Anyone? Anyone? Brian De Palma was a physics major? I can see why he switched careers.
Jamie: Thanks for pointing out that URL, Michael. When I read this, I don't feel so bad for slamming the film:
"The various things that happen to the Mars One and Two crews in this film all come out of the physics of what could happen in the situations presented in the story. So, it is realistic and extremely authentic."
Ha. The scriptwriters must have had a quota of a scientific impossibility every ten minutes, and they made their quota easily. Spacesuit thrust jets at shoulder-level. A plot device that depends on the concept of inertia, followed by an attempted rescue that defies the law of inertia.
This was kind of like watching The Poseidon Adventure, and then suddenly halfway through the movie everyone discovers that they can breathe water and eat plankton. No explanation, that's just the way it is. They all swim out of the ship into the Pacific and then climb ashore, wading up onto the Chicago beach.
Michael: We are of course treated to many close-up shots of M&M (tm) brand chocolate candies along the way, including several gratuitous close-up and pan shots where we focus in on the "m"'s and the bag to make sure that we do, indeed, realize that these are M&M (tm) brand chocolate candies and not some inferior brand X chocolate candies, but real, honest-to-god, M&M (tm) brand chocolate candies. If you didn't realize they were M&M (tm) brand chocolate candies, we'll later spill them all over the floor and stare at them for about 20 seconds straight, with a statistically unlikely distribution where the vast majority of the candies land with the "m" up, just to make sure that we notice that these are M&M (tm) brand chocolate candies.
Also plugged: Isuzu, Pennzoil, SGI, Barq's Root Beer, Dr. Pepper, several others that I don't recall just now. The product placement was offensive enough that if I was writing this review I'd make a really big deal of it. Oh, I guess I am. Like watching two hours of commercials.
The "plot," if one must call it that, was as exciting as watching paint dry. Or maybe watching a "cinematic blend of texture and movement" as your clothes whirl around in the dryer. There's a lot of stilted acting, some manufactured crises, and a mysterious alien thing. "Hey look! I can spin the camera around so it looks like I'm in a rotating ring! Let's just spin! For about 3 minutes! We're spinning! Whoo-hoo! Just like a dryer!"
Jamie: Yes; there's homage to 2001 , and then there's a dull recycling of a special effect that was cool 30 years ago.
Michael: Finally we meet an alien. It's glowing, it's got baby blue eyes, it smiles at us, some beatific music swells, and then it hands us some M&M (tm) brand chocolate candies to munch on while it explains, with a handy diorama, just why it has been living in a big human face on Mars for the last few hundred million years.
Jamie: Don't forget the tear. The big sad crystal tear dangling sadly from the sad, sad alien eye. Did I mention it was sad? It was crying, it was so sad. You could tell it was sad because it was crying a big crystal tear. Also the fact that we'd just watched its entire planet destroyed in a fiery cataclysm. So there were two ways you could tell the alien was sad: the tear, and the incineration of its homeworld.
I had thought at first that the alien was a hologram, but later, it takes the humans' hands and it looks awfully real. Except for the fact that it looks awfully fake and computer-generated. Or maybe this alien race just happens to look like big nine-foot fake computer-generated holograms.
Inside, by the way, the Cydonia "face on Mars." This is the structure photographed in 1976 by the Viking probe, which caused wild speculation that it was an artificial construct. Unfortunately for De Palma, it was almost two years ago that high-resolution photos from the Mars Global Surveyor showed it was just another rocky plateau.
Let me spoil the big secret: the aliens are us. We're them. Obviously the scriptwriters graduated from a Kansas high school, because it turns out that the Precambrian explosion was actually seeded by DNA from Mars, thereby producing fish, alligators, brontosauruses, woolly mammoths, and (six hundred million years later) humans. But meanwhile, apparently, the Martians are us. We're them.
So there's a big weird mystery that the astronauts have to solve, which they do by looking at a rotating computerized graphic of a DNA molecule on a spacecraft that can't take off because all its computers are fried.
Michael: The electromagnetic pulse was selective, you see. Important things like wave analyzers and radar guns and remote-controlled toy cars were EMP-protected, while unimportant things like navigation computers were not.
Jamie: Right. Anyway, in the future, all astronauts are required to memorize the entire human genome, because they can look at the graphic which shows human DNA at the atomic level, recognize that two chromosomes [sic] are missing, and (I'm not making this up) enter the missing atomic structure of the chromosomes that were left out. They complete the graphic picture and open up the door to the giant white room which ripped off both 2001 and THX-1138 .
How did the Martians know what the proper DNA sequencing for those two chromosomes were? How did they know how many chromosomes humans have?
Because they're us, we're them. They created multicellular life, and apparently evolution is not random natural selection at all because this weird holographic Martian DNA doesn't change in 600 million years.
I can't stand movies that go back and forth between hard science and the worst kind of pseudoscience. Give me one or the other, OK? But don't base the plot around science and then expect me to suspend scientific disbelief every ten minutes.
One more example. There's a tense moment inside the THX-1138-style white room where Gary Sinese takes off his spacesuit. But he knows it's OK because he watched the air pressure rise: 6psi, 7psi, etc., and as he cracks his gloves off, another character is saying excitedly "12psi, 13psi." So they know that 14psi is Earth normal and we're expected to keep in mind the difference between Mars air pressure and Earth air pressure.
But for the last hour, the plot has hinged on this guy stranded on Mars for a year, who has stayed alive and healthy by growing plants in a canvas greenhouse.
OK, forget the fact that there's no water in the Martian atmosphere - none. Forget the sunlight being half Earth's and filtered through canvas. Forget canvas not producing a greenhouse effect by any stretch of the imagination. Forget all that; he has some magic beans that let him grow a splashy leafy warm wet jungle inside a canvas greenhouse. OK.
This canvas greenhouse is tethered to the Martian dirt by ropes. It flaps in the Martian wind. It looks about as airtight as, well, a Boy Scout tent. And everyone inside it gets to take their helmets off because it is an Earth-pressure atmosphere. Inside the canvas tent. Mars-pressure outside. Earth-pressure inside. Pressure differential between the two: one ton per square foot. Canvas and rope are going to (a) hold down a thousand tons of force and (b) flap in the breeze. Right!
Michael: Don't forget the temperature differential: Mars' average temperature is something like -70 Fahrenheit. Much colder at night, of course. But I guess the magic greenhouse can fend off -70 degree temperatures too. I wish my military-issue shelter half had been made of that material!
Jamie: And finally, at the end of the film, the astronauts climb into the return vehicle and blast off for Earth. As the credits roll they begin starving to death, because it's a six-month minimum journey and it's already been established they have no food. What a happy ending.
Robert Zubrin, co-author of The Case for Mars , was an advisor to this film and he must have held his nose all the way through it. Zubrin is a rocket scientist who has spent the last ten years telling anyone who would listen about a very realistic, practical system for getting people to Mars within ten years. I know he must have had his reasons for signing on but he must be a little embarrassed now that he's seen the finished product.
The reason this movie offends me so much is because it treats the red planet, and space travel in general, with disrespect. It tries to be realistic, but whenever the science gets in the way of Hollywood, Hollywood wins. It did have some powerful moments, true, and they were especially moving if you believe (as I do) that space exploration is important. But when a science-fiction film jettisons the science, it turns into campy space opera - which makes the good parts just that much harder to take.
Michael: This movie looks like it was stitched together from a couple of thoughts the director had and thought were cool. (The studio probably thought they were being slick, capitalizing on Mars enthusiasm generated by NASA missions, so they rushed it through production, never figuring NASA would just hurl probes at the planet like a bunch of lawn darts.) There's zero consistency between those parts, not even hand-waving, you just jump from one to the next with no explanation whatsoever.
Maybe you could justify spending $2 on a non-new-release movie rental of Mission to Mars, assuming it's even released on video, which I honestly think would be a sick joke. But $30, which is what it costs for two people to attend a movie and buy a soda in Manhattan? I'd rather gouge my eyes out. This one definitely gets two thumbs down, and if I had more thumbs, they'd be down too, unless they were holding a bag of M&M (tm) brand chocolate candies.
Other Reviews:
- Salon: Disney, We Have a Problem
- Rotten Tomatoes has a great pick of choice quotes from dozens of reviewers around the U.S.
Review 2: JonKatz
I had two primary responses to Mission. The first was disbelief that Brian De Palma -- the same man who made Wiseguy, and Scarface, among others -- could have made it. The second was awe at the impact of sophisticated animation on movies. It's now possible for a movie to be beautiful, even awe-inspiring and touching at times, and still be a lousy movie. To me, that was the real fate of Mission To Mars.
The characters were so noble, self-sacrificing and one-dimensional, they were practically cartoons. And what Kubrick and Lucas have done so brilliantly -- remember that space and sci-fi ultimately revolve around very human people and stories -- DePalma forgot. He was so busy evoking awe that any sense of humanity was drowned out.
In fact, DePalma's efforts made me appreciate Lucas especially, who I was beginning to resent for all of his mega-hyping. Whatever Lucas's failings, in all of his movies, you're occasionally blown away by the idea of what might be out there, while still identifying with the hapless humans who are trying to sort it out. DePalma gives us instead some God-like alien life force powerful enough to run the universe, but too dumb to figure out the motives of the encroaching humans. And not a single line of dialogue uttered by any star in this movie made them appear real or relevant. Still, the movie was gorgeous, which is why it will sharply disappoint some people. Three or four space scenes, and some of the scenes on Mars, were really jaw-dropping, and made the movie quite worth seeing.
But DePalma seemed way over his head with the subject matter. High-class science fiction isn't all that easily to replicate, it turns out. In terms of character and narrative, Mission to Mars was a stinker. But I won't be surprised if people with imagination and heart will go see it and be touched.
...they're a satire of geek culture.
Honestly, I went to this movie fully expecting the science to stink. The trailer had been edited to make it look like they exclaimed, "That's human DNA!" after seeing a tiny fragment of a computer-generated model.
I was surprised at how much they got right, not how much they got wrong. This was a science-fiction movie about science and that's an accomplishment in itself.
This movie sucked me right in, and I enjoyed it (in spite of the self-indulgent tracking shot it opens with). So shoot me.
It's discussions like this that give geeks a bad name. The idea of constructing a model of DNA in zero-gravity is much better evidence of a creative and functioning brain than these inane complaints. I admit I was put off by the fact that it was rotating, but I could do a better job a showing rotation is possible than these pseudo-physicists could at showing it couldn't be done. Most of them don't even mention Coriolis effects in their discussion of the physics of a moving model inside a rotating space ship.
This kind of review is the geek equivalent of the football star who picks on the kid with tape on his glasses. If the athlete wins, nobody's impressed. And, if the physicists find a mistake in a sci-fi movie, nobody's gonna say, "Wow, those physicists know more science than those Hollywood writers!"
But, if the dorky guy with glasses knows judo and gets more right in the fight than the football-head, it is truly embarassing. And that's what's happened this case. This movie has some errors, sure. But nothing near like the number of mistakes made in these threads.
"Mission to Mars" gets many things right which have never been done well in any movie. It has the best orrery I've ever seen. When the asteroid hits Mars I was genuinely impressed (and surprised). The zero-g pas-de-deux was brilliant, and there were a number of things I doubt any of these griping geeks could have done as well in a million years. Of all the attempts to show how first-contact communication could be accomplished quickly, this is the only one I've ever seen that rang true.
Eternal vigilance only works if you look in every direction.
Another Mission to Mars review