Mission to Mars (2000)

The first mission to Mars lands on the planet, and is never heard from again. A second scientific mission is launched, doubling as a rescue team. During the voyage, one of the crew sacrifices himself. They land on Mars and find that one of the astronauts from the previous mission is alive and is living in a greenhouse-like tent where he is surrounded by living plants that provide oxygen. When he is found, he, like Robinson Crusoe, is half crazy, but in time realizes that he is being rescued. The team approaches the formation called The Face on Mars (which is really a spaceship). A door of light opens and they encounter a sort of advanced planetarium where they see an asteroid collide into Mars. Then there appears a tall, thin, golden more-or-less humanoid alien with tearful huge eyes who welcomes them and then “schools” them about the origin of life on earth and the human race. Gary Sinise’s widower character chooses to remain with the alien spaceship as it takes off for “home.” The other astronauts return to their spacecraft.

The Face on Mars

When I first learned of this movie, I was excited. After all, it was being directed by Brian DePalma, an A-list director if there ever was one; it was written by Jim Thomas & John Thomas, whose two Predator films were amazing and outstanding on every level, and by Graham Yost, whose Speed and Broken Arrow were equally amazing in my view; and the score was by Ennio Morricone, one of cinema’s best and most influential film composers. What was there not to like?

Yet, Mission to Mars is simply a bad movie. In so many ways it’s insulting and proves that just the ability to make movies does not prevent movie makers from going south.  And not having a modicum of respect for science doesn't help. Here a some examples of where the story failed. In a good movie every character, every shot, and every line of dialogue is supposed to be there for a reason, to move the story forward. Anything else is extraneous. In this light, the opening party sequence is simply long and horribly boring and provides nothing to the plot except letting the audience know that astronauts have parties before they take off. Yes, during this party sequence some exposition and character motivation is provided that is intended to help orient the audience, but couching this material within this particular boring party doesn’t work. The audience has come to see a space exploration movie and what they get is a backyard barbeque. The feeling of betrayal is too strong to allow for the ready absorption of trivial data that will later become apparent in any case.

Further, is the audience really supposed to believe that the characters played by Tim Robbins and Connie Nelson are in an over-the-top love relationship characterized by the utterly juvenile saccharine sweet cloyingness we see on the screen—a relationship that serves no purpose in the story. Further, early on, he sacrifices his life to save her life, but that whole incident also has no purpose. In other words, those two characters could have been eliminated and the story would not be any different. It seems like so much padding to me.

Yes, the movie has some interesting designs and the Martian surface looks nice; I tend to agree with The Village Voice's critic Stephanie Zacharek’s comment: “...a half-dreamy, half-plausible effect achieved in part by cinematographer Stephen Burum’s use of light reflectors made of copper sheeting...."

Some nice Martian surfaces

Yet anything good about the movie comes to a crashing end when we encounter the alien being inside The Face on Mars. The whole ending is supposed to be meaningful, thought-provoking, and reminiscent of the ending of 2001: A Space Odyssey, but it fails on all counts.

The sad-eyed alien

And to make matters worse, Ennio Morricone, whose scores I have admired vastly for decades, provided such subtle, gentle music that, frankly, I never noticed it through a few viewings, even though I tried. It wasn’t until I focused solely on his score that I really heard it.

Via the "planetarium" and the sad-eyed alien, we are led to believe that a long time ago a big asteroid hit Mars, devastating the planet so that its entire civilization evacuated the planet in thousands of spaceships that raced off in all directions, and that one of these spaceships came to earth and “seeded” it with the most basic protozoan life forms, and that all life on earth resulted from this seeding. Now let us consider this notion from both geological and biological points of view. 

The earth is about four and a half billion years old; fossils of single-celled creatures from 3.6 billion years ago have been found in Africa and Australia. Yet these oldest fossils, the oldest yet found, while single-celled are still relatively complex organisms, so it would have taken at least perhaps another half billion years for life to come into being by baby steps from nothing and then evolve into the creatures found in Africa and Australia. Thus, if that Mars seeding did occur as demonstrated in the movie, all those space ships evacuated Mars around four billion years ago. Now, remember that the sun and all the planets of the solar system were formed at roughly at the same time from coagulating cosmic gases and dust, and that seems to have been four and a half billion years ago. Mars is sufficiently like Earth that we can say with certainty that it’s basic formation and geological evolution, as well as any hypothetical morphology, would have been similar to earth’s early history. Sure, it’s been shown that Mars once had a denser atmosphere and liquid water millions of years ago, but we are discussing here matters of billions of years, not millions.

The "planetarium"

Now, taking all this into account, we are being told in Mission to Mars that at a time before any life first emerged on earth four billion years ago, give or take, apparently Mars already had an advanced civilization that could launch thousands of space ships. Are we supposed to believe that Mars life accomplished that feat in four billion fewer years than life on Earth ... that while the earth had zero life, somehow Mars life had advanced miraculously into the space age? Well, guess what—that makes no sense whatsoever.

Taking a different tact, if the aliens that launched all those spaceships billions of years ago were actually from a much older different planet indigenous to a different star system and were merely stopping over on Mars, perhaps as a sort of observation post in our solar system, then that would be a different matter entirely—but that is never stated and thus we can assume was never intended by the writers of Mission to Mars.

How could such gifted writers and filmmakers be so ignorant of basic science and come up with such illogical nonsense? This ending is ludicrous, pointless, and insulting.

Mission to Mars (2000)

USA. Touchstone Pictures (Walt Disney Productions), A Jacobson Production. C. 2.35:1. 113m 

CREW: Director Brian De Palma. Producer Tom Jacobson. Co-Producers David Goyer, Justis Greene, Jim Wedaa. Executive Producer Sam Mercer. Screenplay Jim Thomas, John Thomas, Graham Yost. Story Lowell Cannon, Jim Thomas, John Thomas. Score Ennio Morricone. Director of Photography Stephen H. Burum. Editor Paul Hirsch. Casting Denise Chamian. Production Designer Ed Verreaux. Special Visual Effects Industrial Light & Magic, Dream Quest Images, Tippett Studio, Jim Henson’s Creature Shop, The Orphanage, CIS Hollywood. Special Makeup Effects KNB EFX Group. Model Designer SpaceProps.com. Conceptual Artist Syd Mead.

CAST: Jim McConnell Gary Sinise. Woody Blake Tim Robbins. Luke Graham Don Cheadle. Terri Fisher Connie Nielsen. Phil Ohlmyer Jerry O’Connell. Maggie McConnell Kim Delaney.


Formal Notice: All images, quotations, and video/audio clips used in this blog and in its individual posts are used either with permissions from the copyright holders or through exercise of the doctrine of Fair Use as described in U.S. copyright law, or are in the public domain. If any true copyright holder (whether person[s] or organization) wishes an image or quotation or clip to be removed from this blog and/or its individual posts, please send a note with a clear request and explanation to eely84232@mypacks.net and your request will be gladly complied with as quickly as practical.