+ another review of Mission to Mars by Tobias Peterson
Mirrorshades
Kurt Neumann's 1950 Rocketship X-M may be the progenitor of
space exploration films, at least if you believe the claims its
video box makes for it. If this is true, then it's a wonder the
space-mission movie genre ever caught on: the box-copy fails to
mention how god-awful Rocketship X-M is, a movie founded on the
jaw-droppingly ridiculous premise that the first ever crewed
mission to the Moon flies to Mars by mistake. Whoops.
As the rocket's flight crew begins their trip to the Moon, or
Mars, or wherever, the navigator (Hugh O'Brian) watches the
Earth recede through a porthole and sweet-talks one of the crew's
scientists (Osa Massen). "It's a marvelous sight, isn't it?" he
says. "You study maps and globes and try to visualize, but the
actual experience... it's hard to express it." Never mind that
the awe-inspiring spectacle is in fact a cloudless globe hanging
on a wire. In a movie conceived seven years before Sputnik made
orbital photographs of Earth possible, Rocketship X-M's Blue
Planet looks from space to be a literal version of what
map-makers — restricted to ground-based data and maybe unaware
that the thin vapors of Earth's clouds might be visible from
orbit — had long imagined it might be.
Fifty years, several moonshots, and thousands of orbital missions
later, Brian De Palma's Mission to Mars reminds us that the
practice of shooting terrestrial metaphors into space is pretty
durable. Rocketship X-M projects its era's Cold War
preoccupations into the universe at large by giving us a Martian
utopia done in by atomic conflict. Mission to Mars exploits
millennial interest in tabloid theories and wrath-of-God-style
Armageddons by proposing that the "face" earthlings think they
see on Mars is real, and by giving us a Martian race scattered
throughout the cosmos by an asteroid blast. Like Rocketship X-M, Mission to Mars also features an awe-inspiring sight that
defies description: a three-dimensional model of the solar system
that a doe-eyed, Close Encounters-ish alien uses to illustrate
the asteroid strike that ended Martian society. Never mind that
this special effect is essentially an interactive planetarium.
With Rocketship X-M, Kurt Neumann taught us a half-century ago
that cinematic science fiction, when at a loss for better ideas,
isn't afraid to hitch earthbound cosmological visions to a
rhetoric of speechless wonder. Neumann and De Palma both forge
the illusion of exploration and discovery without really creating
anything new.
Mission to Mars opens with a yard party to celebrate the
imminent launch of the first crewed Mission to Mars, "Mars I,"
which is being sent to explore a portion of the Red Planet known
as Cydonia. When an unknown force demolishes Mars I, "Mars II" is
sent to investigate. This second mission bears married couple
Terri Fisher and Woody Blake (Connie Nielson and Tim Robbins),
Jim McConnell (Gary Sinise, looking none the worse after being
grounded with the measles in Apollo 13), and Phil Ohlmyer
(Jerry O'Connell). Mars II encounters some problems and is also
destroyed, while still in orbit around Mars.
The remaining crewmembers find their way to the Martian surface
in a stunningly improbable way, and retrieve the only survivor of
the ill-fated Mars I, Luke Graham (Don Cheadle, Boogie Nights's
stereo salesman). Luke babbles a fair bit about the "secret" that
destroyed his ship and crew, prompting his rescuers (who are,
incidentally, just as marooned as he is) to doubt his sanity.
They become believers when Luke shows them a gigantic stone face
near the site where the original crew was killed. The face also
broadcasts radio signals that are decoded to resemble a strand of
human DNA with some of the information missing. At first the crew
believes this signal to be a map of the Martian genetic
structure, a self-portrait of whatever created the face. They
later discover that it really is incomplete human DNA, a sort of
authenticity check the Martians issue to make sure that only
humans come knocking. When the crew broadcasts a reply containing
the missing information (using a cuter, perkier version of the
Pathfinder probe), the passcode is provided and a door opens up
on the side of the face. One half-expects to learn the movie was
underwritten by the Human Genome Foundation.
It makes sense that De Palma cocoons his extraterrestrial mystery
in a pale reflection of humanity. He reduces the human species to
a product placement, in a foreshadowing of the DNA plot when Phil
arranges a zero-gravity helix of floating M&Ms in the air. After
Jim flicks some of the M&Ms away, Phil's genetic model provides
the flash of inspiration the crew eventually needs to figure out
the purpose of the Martian signals. The M&Ms are even
superimposed on the screen when the crew realizes what the alien
signal is, in case the audience missed the connection: just like
Phil's name-brand sculpture, the signal is simply an incomplete
encoding of humanity, waiting for humans to come along and
complete it. The Mars II crew unlocks the signal not by thinking
outside the boundaries of human civilization, but by examining
humans exhaustively, completing the signal with the aid of a
comprehensive catalog of human DNA. Encyclopedic knowledge of
one's own species seems a reasonable prerequisite when, later on,
the friendly Martian immerses the crew in a little virtual solar
system, a planetarium. Sure, we'd have to know ourselves
perfectly before learning the secret of the universe, as long as
this secret turns out to be simply a reiteration of the same
universal view we've had all along.
The crew expresses their sense of oneness with the alien species
through product placement, also, with a gut-churningly cheesy
evocation of an "I'd like to buy the world a Coke"-style ethos.
The planetarium pays off, horrendously, as the Mars II crew holds
hands around a holographic Earth. "They're us," says Terri,
meaning the Martians, "We're them." But I think Rocketship X-M
summed up this fatuous view of universal oneness a little better
fifty years ago. The mastermind of Rocketship's moonshot, Dr.
Ralph Fleming (Morris Ankrum), explains that scientists have
turned their attention to the Moon because "they visualize the
successful lunar expedition as the first step toward practical
interplanetary travel. Today, there is even the possibility that
an unassailable base could be established on the Moon to control
world peace." Mission to Mars pretends to embrace a dream of
cosmic love when all it's really doing is restating a standard,
solipsistic view of the universe. Rocketship X-M is at least a
little more upfront when its space-flight engineers "envision" an
outer space conquered by and enforcing Western science: what the
engineers in fact envision is a night sky in which all earthlings
see is other earthlings, looking back.
