Mission To Mars

10 April 2012

I have a theory: the US box office success of Brian de Palma's latest film (Mission: To Blandly Go Where Everyone Has Been Before) is entirely due to the lengthy, nay, interminable anti-gravity sequences contained therein. This has unwittingly provided a wish-fulfilment fantasy for increasingly big-bottomed Americans who see a hopeful future condition in which they can float around their condominiums with the grace of a plastic bag (see American Beauty) however grossly obese they become. There can be no other explanation.

The opening scenes are promising. In defiance of expectation, the curtain rises on a backyard barbecue somewhere in small-town Texas, complete with Zydeco sound-track, where a gathering of Nasa's finest astronauts and their families are having the last cook-out before the first manned space flight to the Red Planet. The year, we discover later, is 2020, though there is little of the usual futurist dressing to suggest this. Familiar faces abound: Tim Robbins, Don Cheadle and, late to the party, Gary Sinise. So far, so good.

A few crucial plot points are revealed over the sizzling steaks and frothing beer. Mars expert and erstwhile mission commander Jim O' Connell (Sinise) will stay home on Earth owing to his failure to complete his pre-mission training following the tragically early death of his wife. Luke Graham (Cheadle) has stepped in and feels guilty about displacing his colleague as the First Man on Mars. Within minutes (Ah, the magic of movies!) Graham and his three crew members are wandering around the Martian surface with the assistance of a roving robot. During their investigation of a large mound, a dust storm rises and a writhing snakelike tunnel appears from the top which sucks in one unfortunate and dispatches the rest. Only Graham survives. He manages to send a garbled, panic-stricken message to Earth before the pan-galactic phone lines go down for good.

If De Palma's film had stayed in this mode something might have been salvaged. But the ensuing mission to rescue Graham and discover what went wrong goes pear-shaped at every available opportunity. The script drifts off as if released from its safety line into anti-gravity and floats beyond rescue. Schlocky romantic longeurs hold up the action, which is slow to begin with.

The problem with space action (the "authentic" kind, anyway) is that, like underwater "action", it is decelerated by the medium, leaving the viewer to marvel at the stunning cinematography and balletic slow-motion activity of the protagonists. Or not. Far too often, De Palma opts for scenes that are designed to do little more than show off the sets and effects; the story stalls in mid-flight and the lush orchestration of Ennio Morricone's uninspired score prevents further ignition. My heart sank even further when we had to endure Sinise in a mode of major melancholia watching videos of his dead wife just before he embarks on the rescue mission.

Line by line, the script degenerates into sentimental drivel and philosophical twaddle. Whatever originality it offered in the beginning soon dissipates into nonsensical exchanges, random plotting and derivative scenes. At his best, De Palma always appeared to be a Hitchcock apologist (or at least a practised pasticheur) but he now seems to have given up all pretence of being an auteur and simply loots from every science-fiction film imaginable.

Here are the slowly swirling pristine interiors of 2001, there the blinding white spatial arenas of THX 1138; the little robot and the lush fertility of the Martian greenhouse are straight out of Silent Running, the slavish authenticity is borrowed from Apollo 13 and the ultimate resolution is a rip-off of Close Encounters. There's the breathable liquid from The Abyss and the reach-out-and-touch-a-friendly-alien sentiments from Contact. Even the antigrav blood leaking from a punctured hand was done better in Star Trek III The Wrath of Khan. In other words, it's a pick-andmix intergalactic mess.

A clumsily signalled allusion to Treasure Island finally bears fruit when the rescuers discover a hairy, half-mad Cheadle popping up like Ben Gunn - a scene which drew howls of derision from at least one critic at the press screening. But there's more. If astronauts going to Mars are vetted for intelligence how is it that one of the crew, seeing three graves on the planet's surface, blithely assumes that the fourth member of the team is still alive? It takes another crew member (a female, natch) to point out that "there was just no one left to bury him". Duh!

Product placement is shameless. A sachet of Dr Pepper is utilised in anti-gravity to seek a breach in the hull; a packet of M&Ms is used to create floating DNA models. Amused? You won't be.

Given that the climax of the film relies on what can only be construed as a game of Trivial Pursuit (though there is a suggestion that they are aiming at a higher, more Sphinx-like quiz) you can tell the level of excitement the film generates. Per ardua ad astra? Ardua it certainly is. They should have stayed at the barbecue.

Mission To Mars
Cert: certPG

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