This is my review of "Mission to Mars". If you still want to
see it, skip my review. Fair warning.
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"If you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all."
Good advice, except sometimes I'm left bursting with a rant.
So I'll do what I can with saying something nice - first.
Damn. It's hard.
Some of the actors had their good moments. Cheadle, when talking
to Sinise about the upcoming mission. Nielsen, when free-fall
dancing with Robbins.
Visually, the movie was fairly appealing, giving shots of
Mars features the way Sagan would have loved to have done them
20 years ago.
But what a waste of effort!
Not that the movie didn't start out nicely. We get to meet good
guy Luke and good guy Jim, and we find out what great buddies
all these astronauts are, and that the guys all have sexy wives,
except Jim, which is properly tragic. But instead of going
somewhere with all that, the story deteriorates rapidly into
pointless special effects and contrived plot and, to quote one
reviewer whose advice I should have heeded, cheese.
I'd loved to have seen the accident on Mars 2 be dealt with by
their competent crew back Earthside: maybe something like
Apollo 13, where we all knew how the story was going to end,
but were still sitting on the edge of our seats. Instead we're
treated to a series of predictable plot twists that would more
properly be found in one of the "Airport" movies.
It would have been nice if the mystery on Mars were something
interesting. Instead one of those damned space aliens pops up
and ruins the whole story. If I never see a group of supposedly
intelligent humans gazing worshipfully at an elfin space alien
again in my life, it will be too soon! (Someone shut off the
music!) This thing is evil! Its stupid burglar alarm killed
three crew members! What's wrong with you all?
The problem is, of course, that for many people space aliens
have supplanted our conventional deities. They're either very
very good, and can get away with anything they like, or they're
very very evil, and nothing they do is right. Few intelligent
treatments of non-human intelligent beings like "Enemy Mine"
exist, and apparently "Mission to Mars" wasn't going to be one,
either.
Finally, "Mission to Mars" had the opportunity to use our
fin-de-siecle movie technology to present viewers with a
realistic picture of what such missions to Mars will actually
be like. But nope! The shots of the centrifuge have astronauts
scurrying up and down the ladders with no sign of Coriolis'
gentle push. Jim McConnell runs around for minutes without his
helmet on, when he should be more intimately acquainted with
emergency procedures than any of the rest. They shut down the
centrifuge without going through a lock-down. Computer consoles
announce in cheerful color and complex graphics that the
computers have crashed. Systems that can show pretty pictures
of fuel running to the engines can't detect a loss of pressure.
What the heck was with that explosion?
Aside from the problem that jumping out of a spacecraft that
missed orbital insertion isn't going to stop the intrepid
astronauts from missing orbit, too, I'd have hoped that they
could at least have demonstrated how orbital mechanics work.
But no, complete systems failure there, too. The astronauts
go *faster* to catch a spaceship that orbits *lower*. Even
after Blake tumbles into space he somehow manages to stop
tumbling and maintain attitude, even though his space suit
is out of fuel. Good trick!
Mars gravity is 1/3 Earths, but nothing in the movie even
hints at this. Even the makeshift sled they drag to the base
camp seems to be pulled down by Earth gravity. The battle in
the greenhouse shows none of the loss of coordination in
McConnell that would afflict someone who just arrived on Mars.
And if the computers were wiped out by the EMP, what the heck
is Luke running with that breadboard assembly?
The remaining gaffs of the movie pale besides these problems.
But I wouldn't want to stop here and fail to point out that
alien DNA used to jump start life on Earth has no more chance
of being recognized as "human" than would cockroach DNA, nor
breaths there a biologist who can recognize human DNA from a
computerized animation of the double helix. The "movie" of
evolution was a travesty. The aliens should have just moved
to the Earth instead of flying off to another galaxy, and
galaxies are terribly far away compared to the stars in our
own galaxy, and the stoopid aliens didn't even give McConnell
so much as a steering wheel! And if they're so dang concerned
about acceleration that they drown McConnell in breathable
fluid, then what's with the spinning during takeoff? And why
is it necessary to destroy the "face on Mars"?
What's particularly galling to me is that the two SF movies in
recent memory that I actually enjoyed, "Mystery Men" and
"Galaxy Quest", weren't even supposed to be taken seriously.
Therein, I think, lies an explanation of why SF is still, by
and large, best done with the printed word.
---
Helge Moulding
mailto:[log in to unmask] Just another guy
http://hmoulding.cjb.net/ with a weird name
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