Mission to Mars

Written by: Lowell Cannon, Jim Thomas Starring: Gary Sinise, Tim Robbins, Don Cheadle, Kim Delaney, Connie Nielsen

Have you ever noticed that when a movie lacks plot, the writers try to cover it up by adding a lot of non-essential backstory? “Mission to Mars” is a classic case. As if they realize they don’t have much to say or do, the filmmakers spend an inordinate amount of time on a party that takes place before any astronauts actually leave the earth. I suppose this is to show that the three leading men--Jim McConnell (Sinise), Woody Blake (Robbins), and Luke Graham (Cheadle)--are super-good pals and really look out for each other, as well as to drearily exposit some background on the tragic death of McConnell's wife, but it doesn’t work. The party is just a boring interlude, one we have seen too many times before. If you are writing a space movie, I say, then get the hell into space, for God’s sake. They do eventually, of course, but unfortunately, once they get there not much actually happens. Oh, there are some explosions, and some action, and some floating around in weightlessness, but it's all window dressing, a rather thin attempt to conceal the fact that the movie has no substance.

Adding to the problem is that the movie tells the same story twice. First, a team goes to Mars, and disaster befalls them. Then another team has to go to Mars (on a rescue mission), and guess what? Disaster befalls them too! Speaking as someone who has written a script in which the same story is told twice, I am here to tell you that it doesn't work, and “Mission to Mars” is no exception. You know you are in trouble when title cards on the screen keep informing you that many, many months have passed since the last scene. That suggests that everything we just watched could have been summarized in thirty seconds, and in fact, they could have started the picture at the point where, after 60 minutes, we are just arriving. An awful lot of time in this picture is spent on traveling to a place where stuff is supposed to happen. I am especially surprised at DePalma for this, since he is usually a storyteller of remarkable lucidity, and a keen judge of pacing and tempo. He is also a master of the sinuous camera, one of the few directors who can send shivers down your spine just by the way he shoots a scene.

There is some of that talent struggling to get out in “Mission to Mars,” but mostly it remains buried under a ton of cliché and pretentious nonsense. In any event, after a lot of male (apologies to Nielsen, playing Terry, Woody’s wife) bonding and leaden dialogue, the rescue team catches up with Luke, who by now has a beard, and has been rendered quite wild-eyed by his enforced year of solitude on Mars. The whole gang then goes bumbling around in a Martian sandstorm, and they find the key to life on earth inside a gigantic sculpture of a face that looks like an Easter Island head on steroids. This secret, I am sad to say, is absolutely conventional stuff that UFO enthusiasts have been spouting for years; you'd think the least the writers could do would have been to come up with something original. Our heroes meet up with an alien (or at least a hologram of one) who looks like Disney's version of Nefertiti, draped in Christmas lights. It has the same doe-eyed, humanoid, androgynous, three-fingered shape that by now has become the standard issue version of an alien among the Roswell crowd. It even sheds a tear.

In case you haven't gotten it from my tone, the whole thing is ridiculous, and by this point in the movie I had basically lost all respect for everyone involved. For that matter, by this point even the usually solid Sinise was looking faintly embarrassed by the goings-on. But then, muddle-headed thinking is the norm in this picture. If the alien civilization was so smart and technologically advanced, couldn't they have come up with a better way of checking out the genetic makeup of new arrivals than tearing them limb from limb with a storm that looks like one of the “Twister” tornadoes on acid? Or, for that matter, why go to all the trouble of “seeding” the earth and then flying 3 trillion light-years away? Why not just take the local to the planet in move-in condition? To be fair, there are some nice outer space shots, and the zero-grav effects are fairly convincing (and I did like the notion of the rescue team orbiting Mars without a spaceship). But Kubrick did a pretty good job with the space stuff a long time ago in “2001.” And “E.T.” is ancient history. Which means that “Mission to Mars” is one small stumble for a filmmaker, and one giant step backwards for the film going public. (3/20/00)