Subject: Review: Mission to Mars (2000)

From: Brian Matherly <[email-masked]>
Date: 16 Apr 2000 18:52:28 GMT

Mission To Mars (2000)
Rating: 0.5 stars out of 5.0 stars

*** Warning - The following review contains spoilers ***

Cast: Gary Sinise, Don Cheadle, Connie Nielsen, Jerry O'Connell, Kim
Delaney, Tim Robbins, Elise Neal, Jill Teed, Jody Thompson, Bill Timoney 
Written by: Jim Thomas, John Thomas and Graham Yost 
Directed by: Brian DePalma 
Running Time: 115 minutes 

The first big event movie of 2000 turns out to be anything but.  Gary
Sinise stars as an astronaut who is removed from a Mars mission when his
astronaut wife, Maggie (Kim Delaney), becomes ill and passes away.  Don
Cheadle is then given the mission along with a Russian couple and a
young hotshot.  When a strange whirlwind shot from the top of a Mars
mountain range attacks the crew of the mission, Sinise and Robbins
convince their superior to let them, Neilsen, and O'Connell perform a
rescue mission for whatever crew might be remaining.  What they discover
on the surface of the planet will dramatically change their lives
forever (although no one watching the film will come away profoundly
affected). 

Before I ever saw the film, I was aware of the promotional campaign with
Dr. Pepper.  Every time I would see a bottle of the soft drink, the
Mission to Mars logo was emblazoned upon it.  Little did I know that the
plot would be taking a back seat to the product placement of the drink
and several other products.  Dr. Pepper saves the day at one point, and
a dream sequence/flashback features Jerry O'Connell shoving M&M's in our
face.  These are but a couple of the ridiculous examples of product
placement scattered throughout the film. 

Clichés are also the order of the day with Mission to Mars.  Dialogue
and character motivations are all lifted directly from countless other
science fiction films that have all done it better and with more style
(even Independence Day, which lifted all of IT'S premises from other
sci-fi films was better than this film, and I don't like Independence
Day).  Films like 2001:A Space Odyssey, The Abyss, and Close Encounters
of the Third Kind are all blatantly stolen from (and poorly at that). 
There is even a sequence where a rover is traveling through a canyon,
and I couldn't help but whisper "u'tinni" to myself and wait for a Jawa
to quickly hide in the rocks before the rover could get a glimpse of it. 

This film also features one of my all-time least favorite movie clichés:
the "he would have wanted you to have this" moment, where one character
gives another a trinket that yet another character is established as
constantly having (and is usually made fun of by the character who ends
up getting all sappy over it later on).  Scenes like these always bother
me when they come out of nowhere in regular films, but in a film as
cliché ridden as this, it is particularly irritating. 

Ennio Morricone's music is usually considered to be some of the best
stuff in the projects he works on, but here it is dreadfully
overbearing.  His music sounds like it came straight out of a Vincent
Price movie in certain scenes.  At other times his music is unbearably
over-dramatic.  One sequence involving a daring spacewalk rescue is
given a particularly cheesy sting when it is discovered that the
grappling hook device used for the rescue won't reach its intended
target. 

Mission to Mars is push button filmmaking to the greatest extreme. 
Events are set into motion that are obvious to anyone who has ever seen
a movie and seem like they are just there to evoke an emotional response
in the audience.  We are apparently supposed to be upset that Tim
Robbins character removes his helmet in deep space and kills himself to
save his wife, but I felt extreme boredom coupled with a twinge of
disinterest.  What makes it all worse is that fact that there is no real
reason that Robbins' character needs to turn himself into a popsicle,
except to invoke an emotional response (I could think of at least ONE
way to save him, and the NASA clowns in this film are supposed to be
"smarter" than I am). 

During the finale, when we are finally introduced to the translucent,
conehead, kitty-faced aliens that we ostensibly sprung from, we are
presented with some of the most ridiculously cartoonish CGI ever put to
film (just slightly worse than the plane crash at the end of Air Force
One or the Hell scenes in Spawn).  A brief history lesson about "where
we came from" is proffered, then Sinise is whisked away to be with "the
rest of our people" (he does this because his late wife proclaims in a
video he watches early on that "this is a chance to step foot where no
one else has"). 

>From the press I've been seeing this film receive, it is apparent that
Mission to Mars will be dying a quick death at the theater.  I'm sure
the first weekend or two will be huge, but once word gets out people
will stop going.  Let's just hope the upcoming Red Planet is better than
this and isn't hurt by the negativity this film is generating.  I'd
venture to say it won't be worse than this waste of time.  [PG]

Reviewed by Brian Matherly - [email-masked]
The Jacksonville Film Journal - http://www.jaxfilmjournal.com/