I admit it, I have a soft spot for this movie. I think it was one of the first films I owned on DVD, and it actually has quite a lot going for it, as strange as it sounds. (The script is decidedly not one of those things, but we’ll get to that in a minute.) First – the soundtrack is fantastic, one of Morricone’s finest. I’ve got it playing while I write this, and that’s not intentional – it’s in my ‘space’ rotation. (Along with the Spacecamp music, but that’s a whole other story.) The curse of this film is that they actually do an awful lot right – it’s just that it is overwhelmed by the plot, which is...sigh.
Casting is actually very good, bordering on excellent; the top five actors are all good, and they’re certainly doing their best with what they’ve been given. (I’d really like to watch the alternate universe version of this where they got to do something a little more like ‘Mars Crossing’ or ‘First Landing’.) Effects are good, no problems there, and the use of copper lighting reflectors to make the shots look more like the surface of Mars is downright inspired. Remembering that this was almost two decades ago, most of the shots on the surface are fine, and certainly the space shots are very good, right up to the ‘World Space Station’. Which is bizarre in itself, though I confess the design is fine.
We’re going to have to get to the bad stuff now, aren’t we. I’m going to save the aliens until last. (Because of course there are aliens on Mars.) First of all, let’s look at the crew. Again – the first crew seem fine – scientists and engineers – and that the commander of the expedition is explicitly a Ph.D. rather than a straight military pilot is a good touch. (I still maintain he or she is likely to be a flight surgeon, but that’s another story.) The Mars II crew – our heroes, are perhaps a somewhat different story. Now, sending a married couple into space is fine, and one reasonable solution to the problem of extended missions – you’ve got to be lucky enough that both are qualified astronauts, but astronauts have married ‘within their ranks’ before. (And the two actors actually do a good job with that, as well. It’s far too rare to see a happily married couple on screen...you don’t need unnecessary drama, and I somehow suspect that NASA psychologists would have ruled out a couple on the brink of divorce.)
I’m going to cut to the chase. Gary Sinese’s character looks and acts for most of the movie as though he’s either on the brink of taking a short walk out of the airlock or bursting into tears. As I said – he does a good job with what he has, but there’s no way that anyone with problems that bad would leave the launchpad. And NASA, in their infinite wisdom, sends him on a mission with a married couple who go as far as dancing in front of him. That’s really going to cheer him up. We’re into ‘Right Stuff’ territory here, but as a rule, anyone describing a realistic mission should assume that the astronauts are psychologically stable. Which does not preclude drama, not at all – but there’s no harm with being a little logical about this.
After doing so damned well with mission durations earlier, it all falls to pieces. The ‘Mars Rescue’ mission launches months ahead of schedule, carrying ‘less cargo’. Wait a minute – this mission is going to need the capability to carry five people home, not four. True, there is an ERV on the surface, but there’s no guarantee it can be repaired. You need more consumables, not less. And you can’t just wake up one morning and decide to go to Mars. (Something very well portrayed in The Martian, I note.) Naturally, if a crew went missing, the next mission would be forced to alter its schedule to accommodate an investigation and rescue effort. That might mean leaving a crewman behind to be able to bring another one back, or changing the payload for more food, or...there are options here. And drama aplenty, potentially. Who risks riding the wounded ERV home, for example?
Why is Mission Control on a space station? Yes, there’d be some use made of one – I’d launch my transit vehicle unmanned to save on weight, ferry the crew over from somewhere else, and you might as well use an orbital facility if you have it – but that doesn’t need any special facilities, other than a few extra supplies, maybe a single logistic mission in support. (You can do this without a station - but I think we’re going to have one, potentially commercial.) What you wouldn’t do is put Mission Control up there. Frankly, if you can fit the Johnson Space Centre on your space station, going to Mars is going to be pretty damned easy.
God, we haven’t even left LEO yet.
Mars II is punctured by meteorites. Yeah, I guess, but...sigh. Fine. Except that they cause enough damage to the engine that it explodes when they attempt orbital insertion – damage that doesn’t show on a status board or even a pre-flight checklist. Bluntly, no. Just...no. And then they abandon ship, because...of course. Why not. We’re already heading into fantasy realms here. I cannot imagine how the manoeuvre portrayed in the film could actually work. The delta-v required by the spacesuits would probably be enough that they could soft-land wearing them, given a heat-shield. And then Tim Robbins’ character dies, in a scene that has to be seen to be believed. He jets over to an orbital supply ship that, for no reason, wasn’t sent down to Mars to help the stranded survivor, clamps a line onto the ship, but fails to hold on himself. (Why he didn’t loop the line to his suit first is a mystery.)
The resultant failed rescue attempt is played for high drama, and the actors involved actually do a good job at trying to pull it off. You really get the emotion. It’s just hard not to scream at the television while it’s playing. I’m sure you can find it on Youtube if you’re interested; I hardly know where to start in describing it. In any case, the three survivors land on Mars, with no supplies – just a few new spares for the ERV. Luckily, that works, and for a while, sanity returns, as they explore the remains of the first expedition, finding the stranded, slightly crazy survivor on his own. That part is fine, and I liked the parallel with Ben Gunn from the start of the film. There are some smart enough parts to this script, but I really wish they’d hired a technical advisor. IMDB suggests they didn’t.
Then the aliens turn up. For some bizarre reason, they landed right next to the ‘Face on Mars’. Sigh. I guess sooner or later a manned expedition would visit it if only to shut the conspiracy theorists up, but if for some reason the first expedition landed in Cydonia, then I think they’d go there first. (And I just realized that the Martian is set in Acidalia Planitia, which includes Cydonia. Mental note – set my book nowhere near the place.) I suppose it isn’t a bad landing site, but come on. There are lots of other places on Mars. Of course, in the film, it’s just as well they did, because it turns out the Face is real, and that the Martians are our ancestors, and that the whole thing was a message inviting us to follow them to the stars. Really...just...no. Just, no. Genetics doesn’t work that way. Some weird alien landing on Earth (assuming it could survive Earth gravity) and seeding some genetic material will produce nothing recognizable. (I confess I did like the part of the ‘what went wrong with Mars’ simulation showing a large impactor – we know that such an impact did take place, and was likely catastrophic for the Martian biosphere. Now there’s somewhere to investigate.)
The curse of Mission to Mars is that it should have been a really, really good movie. Except where script constraints sabotage it, the science is actually pretty good, the cast is good, the direction is good, the budget was big enough to really go to town. Where this falls down is the bizarre insistence that going to Mars isn’t ‘big enough’ to sustain a movie. Imagine doing ‘Scott of the Antarctic’ but insisting that it wasn’t an interesting enough story, so we’ve got to have him fighting Nazis at the South Pole. Or have Apollo 13 sabotaged by the aliens from Roswell. (And don’t joke – I’m sure that’s been pitched by someone, somewhere.) A mission to Mars would be the event of the century, and would have all the excitement and drama you could want.
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