Mission to Mars

Normally, even the worst movies have some isolated mitigating qualities. There may be one decent scene, there may be a hot chick, or the film may be bad in that unique way that makes it enjoyable when drunk late on a Saturday night. "Mission to Mars," however, defies even the most sincere attempts to enjoy it. It offers us pacing slow as a death march and twice as tedious, inept characterization, embarrassingly predictable and stilted dialogue, mawkish sentimentality, tensionless action scenes, and a meandering plot. The resulting movie will stand as a humiliating monument to the ineptitude of director Brian DePalma, Touchstone Pictures, the screenwriters, the crew, the investment banks that financed the film, and anyone else who was even peripherally involved with it. "Mission to Mars" is a bad, bad film.

The movie does in fact concern a mission to Mars, and takes place in a year 2020 which is completely indistinguishable from our year 2000 except that internal combustion engines are not being used in cars anymore and NASA has perfected centrifugal rotation as a substitute for gravity on deep space missions. Strangely, for a movie about deep space peril, we open up at a barbecue, where we learn what stereotypes all the characters represent (the troubled pilot, the happy marrieds, the Russians, the undersexed nerd, and the black guy) and are treated to some sledgehammer-heavy foreshadowing when Don Cheadle summarizes the plot of "Robinson Crusoe" for his son. Sure enough, Cheadle is marooned thirteen months later on Mars when the rest of his crew is killed by a special effect that resembles one of the tornadoes from "Twister" turned on end. Four of his mates come after him, suffer perils, and figure out where the tornado came from.

This is not much plot for a two-hour movie, and Brian DePalma's solution is not to make the movie shorter and tauter but to instruct everyone to read their lines twice as slowly as they normally would, and to insert dramatic pauses until it appears that all of the actors have OD'd on Nyquil. (All of the actors in this film should be exonerated from blame, because what with the script and the direction, there is no way they could possibly have succeeded, even slightly.) The movie thus feels twice as long as it is. DePalma also knows just how to prolong a scene involving emotion past its logical stopping point and ram it full-on into the wall of inexplicability, as when the wife in the marrieds cries for what seems like a good five minutes while floating precariously in space after her husband snuffs himself to save the mission. Don't these people know they have limited oxygen? DePalma's pacing also drains the action scenes of all their tension, making them play more like dream sequences than anything interesting. DePalma is shooting for gravitas but giving us somnolescence. Of course, part of tension is not knowing what's coming next, which is impossible when every third line of dialogue can be predicted word-for-word by the average moviegoer.

"Mission to Mars" insults the intelligence of its audience by attempting to forcibly cue up emotional reactions to it. It fudges endlessly on science, and handles the necessary scientific exposition in the most hamfisted way possible. It...there's no point in this. There is not space enough in this newspaper to catalogue all "Mission to Mars"'s faults, so let us summarize: If there are Martians, and they see this film, they will destroy Earth. And if you see this film, you won't blame them.

I HAD NO IDEA WHAT I WAS GETTING IN FOR

Ladies and gentlemen, a word. I have seen good movies in my movie-reviewer capacity, and I have seen bad movies. I have always tried to focus on the good parts of movies, and relate them to the general viewing public which has not had the opportunity to see the film before it comes out for free. But I have never — never — seen a movie as bad as"Mission to Mars" in a theater. Compared to this, "Sudden Death" was"Citizen Kane" and "Congo" was "Hamlet." Both of those films had minor redeeming qualitites, such as killing the Pittsburgh Penguins' mascot by running him through a cafeteria tray steam cleaning machine or saying "Put 'em on the endangered species list!" when responding to a query about what to do about the mutant killer monkeys who had been menacing the humans for most of the film. But when I sat down to write this review, there was only one thing on my mind: I desperately wanted to rip Brian DePalma a new bunghole. And I can only hope I succeeded.

"Driven," "Bless the Child," and "Battlefield Earth" are all easily worse than this film. A number of other films I have seen are arguably worse. But I will never forget the moment I saw the computer-generated alien cry a solitary tear. The whole audience erupted in disgusted moans. My stomach churned. I felt I had to apologize to Gregorio Villalobos for bringing him to the movie, even though he hadn't, you know, paid any money to see it. "Mission to Mars" was my true introduction to how bad a film could be.

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