Mission to Mars One and a half stars out of Five
I would have walked out of this movie had I not been there with my girlfriend.
I don't know where to start. Let's start with general criticisms:
It's boring.
It's unconvincing.
The characters are simultaneously broad cliched archetypes (which generally means entertainment at the cost of believability) but are also dull and dreary. Not a winning combination.
The film strains to tell you that its One Black Guy, Don Cheadle, is a GENIUS of some sorts, but of course it's ultimately the White Guy (Sinise) who figures everthing out.
It is, indeed, a pastiche of every successful or semi-successful sci-fi film of the past thirty years. More on that later.
Finally, the "Big Revelation" is rather trite and obvious and doesn't even make a hell of a lot of sense.
On to more specific criticisms:
DePalma is a FILM GEEK, not a director. He can't help himself but to make little juvenile references to great films of the past, rather than concentrate entirely on making a great film in the present. There are loads of little "jokes" in the film --
- Cheadle makes a sculpture of the alien cyclone monster (yeah, you heard that right) out of wires and such, *just like* Richard Dreyfus made sculptures of the Devil's Tower in Close Encounters.
- 2001 featured a tall black Monolith with a width of four and a height of nine (proportionately). And in M2M, a door in a white room opens, revealing a jet-black space beyond. This black doorway has a lenght of about nine and a height of about four -- a black monolith laid on its side. Yuk, yuk, yuk. I went to film school. I "get it."
- 2001 also featured a blindlingly-white room near the end. So does M2M.
- 2001 and Close Encounters both feature a single human travelling back to the aliens' homeworld. Guess what? So does M2M.
- 2001 featured a metaphorical "dance" (to the tune of Swan Lake) between a space station and a shuttle docking with it. M2M features a literal dance in zero gravity between Tim Robbins and his wife.
And on, and on, and on.
The structure of M2M is unecessarily convoluted. Here's the plot: Cheadle & some Russians go to Mars. They get attacked by an alien cyclone monster and Earth loses communication with the Mars outpost. So Tim Robbins, Gary Sinise, a chick, and Jerry O'Connell go to Mars to rescue them and find out what happened.
In case you're keeping track, that means that the sixtieth minute of the movie (Gary Sinise arrives on Mars) occurs, in "real time," at least one year after the beginning of the film.
So, we have a film with three blast-offs and two landings. Too many blast-offs and landings for one film. Plus, blast-offs have been done; you can't outdo the blast-off in Apollo 13. So what does DePalma choose to do?
He shows us ZERO blast-offs and landings (well, he shows some very quick shots of blast-offs from Mars at the end). The rest of the time he simply CUTS to Mars, skipping the blast offs and landings. It's very odd, in a movie about space exploration, to simply CUT to Mars, as if you're CUTTING to the local 7-11.
Plus, the film is loaded with bad economics, bad science, and bad logic:
Bad economics: The Mars Mission Control Center is based on the "World Space Station" orbiting the earth. I know why DePalma did this -- to differentiate HIS Mission Control from the MC in Apollo 13 -- but think about it: Does this make any kind of fucking sense? No, it does not.
Bad science: Gary Sinise realizes the Alien Code -- a mathematical representation of a single double-helix strand of DNA -- is missing "two chromosomes" at the end.
Ummmmm... DNA makes up chromosomes, chromosomes DO NOT make up DNA. What's missing is two BASE PAIRS, not two chromosomes.
Bad Logic: (SPOILER) When the Garden-of-Eden, warm, watery Mars is destroyed by an asteroid, the Martians leave the galazy for a planet far, far away. Apparently ignoring the equally-paradisical Earth which is just a million or so miles north.
Before you say: But they didn't want to interfere with Earth's development!!! Then why did they deliberately seed earth with their own DNA? Makes no fucking sense on multiple levels.
