Mission To Mars

No-one had a kind word for Brian De Palma’s film (making it two-in-a-row for the director after the previous year's Snake Eyes and in truth it is a rather strange melding of mawkish middle American family drama, sci-fi adventure and cosmological speculation but it is also rather appealing because of that.

The film begins  with a backyard barbeque that though set in 2020 wouldn’t be out-of place in The Right Stuff at which we meet all the main players. Gary Sinise (who had co-starred with Nicolas Cage in Snake Eyes) is Jim, an astronaut pining for his dead wife, who with his long-time NASA buddies, Woody (Tim Robbins) and Luke (Don Cheadle), are heading off on the second manned ("personned" actually as women are on board including Woody’s wife, Terri, played by Connie Nielsen) flight to Mars. Woody as the commander stays in the mothership with the maudlin Jim while Luke and his three crew members land on Mars. Very soon they discover some kind of  extra-terrestrial presence that incites a huge storm incapacitating their base camp.  Woody, Terri and Jim, mount a rescue mission (with the approval of his boss on Earth, incongruously played by Armin Mueller-Stahl) not only finding Jim alive but managing to establish diplomatic relations with the extra-terrestrials.

Perhaps because it had three writers (Jim Thomas, John Thomas, and Graham Yost) Mission to Mars is an ungainly mixture of ideas cobbled together from the sci-fi stock catalogue, packaged with pseudo-poignant emotionalism and topped off with an ambitious hypothesis about the genesis of life on Earth that climaxes with a corny flourish worthy of Spielberg or Ron Howard..

It would seem that the intention here was to “humanise” space travel much as did The Right Stuff only in this case with a sci-fi setting (the 2020 date, just a fraction beyond our present, is designed purely to support an ordinariness to the mission) but it doesn’t come close to the effectiveness of Kaufman’s film.  Rather it is a quality production that works in some parts, fails badly in others. The 2001-ish representation of space travel technology is well done and the Red Planet convincingly reproduced but the expositional dialogue,  the insistent sentimentality and the two-dimensional characterisation all let it down. For all that, Mission To Mars is more interesting than the barrage of critical abuse in its homeland would lead you to believe.

 

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