Subject: Review: Mission to Mars (2000)

From: Scott Hunt <[email-masked]>
Date: 30 Mar 2000 07:05:32 GMT

Mission to Mars       (2000)

Review by Scott Hunt   Visit me at Movie Hunt
http://netdirect.net/~hunt/index.html)

Cast: Gary Sinise, Don Cheadle, Tim Robbins, Connie Nielsen, Jerry
O'Connell
Writer: Lowell Cannon, Jim Thomas
Director: Brian De Palma

Rating: Off Target (1 out of 4 stars)

After a marketing windup of striking visuals and the promise of star
caliber actors, Mission To Mars ends up throwing a whiffleball.
Fiercely unoriginal, Director DePalma cobbles together a film by
borrowing heavily from what has gone before him. There are aliens
similar to those in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The stranded
astronaut theme is reminiscent of Robinson Crusoe on Mars. The
astronauts encounter space flight difficulties that smack of Apollo 13.
Interior spacecraft visuals are redolent of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Instead of using these components as a launching pad to create his own
movie, De Palma stops right there, refusing to infuse the film with
anything even remotely resembling cleverness or heart.

Mission to Mars takes it's first wobbly steps at a pre-launch barbeque
in which the perfunctory character introductions are done. During these
surface scans of the characters, we learn that Jim McConnell (Sinise)
has lost his wife. It's a plot point revisted throughout the film with
jackhammer subtlety. The rest of the crew exhibit a bland affability.
There is no contentiousness, no friction to add the the dramatic
tension of these men and women being confined to close quarters for an
extended length of time. Maybe DePalma was going for the comraderie of
The Right Stuff, but in that movie, the astronauts had embers of
personality to warm us through the technical aspects.

It's the year 2020 and this is NASA's first manned excursion to the red
planet. A crew, led by Luke Graham (Cheadle), arrives on Mars and
quickly discovers an anomaly, which they investigate with tragic
results. Graham is able to transmit a garbled distress call back to
Earth. In response, Earth sends a rescue team comprised of McConnell,
Woody Blake (Robbins), wife Terri Fisher (Nielsen) and Phil Ohlmyer
(O'Connell). Obstacles are put in the crew's way and and they matter-of-
factly go about solving them. I should say, McConnell goes about
solving them. Time and again, McConnell is presented as some kind of
wunderkind, which wouldn't be so bad if the rest of the crew didn't
come across as so aggressivelly unremarkable. (Mention should be made
of the misogynistic handling of Fisher in a situation where the entire
crew's mission and life is in mortal danger. On a team of
professionals, she is portrayed as an emotion directed weak link. Women
serve no purpose in the movie other than to serve as a reflection of a
male character's personality trait.)

By the time they land on Mars and try to solve the mystery of what
occurred, Mission to Mars starts laying on the cliches and stilted
dialogue with a heavy brush. There is an adage in film to "show, don't
tell." Mission to Mars does both. Repeatedly. Characters obsessively
explain the obvious, explain their actions as they are doing them,
explain to fellow astronauts facts which should be fundamental
knowledge to them. The film's conclusion is momumentally derivative,
anti-climatic and unsatisying. As I walked out I wondered who the
target audience might be for this film. The best I could come up with
is pre-teen age boys, but in this media saturated era, this film's
components would have been old hat even for them. I have to think what
attracted such talent to this film was the lure of making a  good,
modern day B-movie. The key to such a venture is a certain depth and
sincerity towards the material. I felt no such earnestness.

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