Mission to Mars Review
by Jerry Saravia (faust668 AT aol DOT com)November 18th, 2002
MISSION TO MARS (2000)
Reviewed by Jerry Saravia
RATING: One star and a half
Firstly, Brian De Palma has aped Hitchcock in most of his work, and done it with real style and pizazz. Sometimes his work turned to other corners of inspiration, like his homage to Eisenstein's "Potemkin" in "The Untouchables." Then there were his early political films like "Greetings" and "Hi, Mom!" But where on earth does "Mission to Mars" belong in this director's career? Somewhere between the botched "The Bonfire of the Vanities" and the ludicrously overwrought "Scarface." "Mission to Mars" is a bad film, a sort of cinematic link to Kubrick's "2001," but it is a boring, highly unimaginative work, not the sort of enjoyably sleazy badness of "Body Double" or the campiness of "Raising Cain." All you might do is doze through most of this mission.
A few astronauts in the year 2020 are sent to Mars to excavate and discover the red planet where no atmosphere exists. According to this film (and I suppose this is a known scientific fact), it takes six months to get to Mars from Earth and another six to return naturally. It felt like six months sitting through this mess. But I digress, as we discover in the first half-an-hour that a trip to Mars was a foolish idea from the start. A sandstorm with a peering, snakelike tornado sucks in everything in its sight, including two fellow astronauts. One survives, as played by Don Cheadle, which makes sense since he is the best actor in the group. Other astronauts at a nearby ship in space decide to go to Mars and get Cheadle back safely. The actors playing this other group of geniuses include Tim Robbins, Gary Sinise, Jerry O'Connell and Connie Nielsen. They all seem out of place, as if they rather be somewhere else.
To be fair, "Mission to Mars" has some bravura moments since no De Palma film can be without at least one (remember the breathless long take at the beginning of "Bonfire of the Vanities," for starters?) A tense sequence in the ship which is slowly coming apart due to holes in and around the exterior is a vintage suspense piece. I also liked the sand storm that sucks everything in its sight. And there is a nifty long take inside the ship as it rotates and we see all the different characters defying gravity. Still, Stanley Kubrick mastered those kinds of shots with far more finesse and control than is evidenced here. And that is it, folks. The ending is protracted and corny, including the sight of an alien that would barely survive as someone's desktop background in their computer. It takes so long to get to the rushed climax that all I said to myself was, "Is that it?" Can De Palma be serious trying to pass something meaningful and poetic in what appears to be a video game sequence that would not make it any arcade?
I sat dumbfounded and annoyed with "Mission to Mars" because everyone involved can, and should, do better. I know De Palma is trying to get back into the game with a box-office hit. "Mission to Mars" is the low road to desperation - unexciting, inert and innocuous. It is clear evidence that De Palma is temporarily AWOL.
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