Salocin

Mission to Mars

I finally watched this in the belief that if someone was going to put together a budget big enough to make a movie that was set on Mars and in space, they'd at least take the trouble to make sure the script was half decent. Obviously I have some way to go before I fully understand the extent to which filmmakers are willing to compensate for a bad script by using a space theme and lots of marketing. This is hit and run filmmaking at its worse.

The world's first manned mission to Mars seems to be going well, but then an interaction with a large object on the surface of Mars results in devastation and damage to all involved. Another team is sent to look for survivors and understand what went wrong.

A succession of events, mostly resulting from bad luck, cause the rescue team to crash land on the planet, whereupon they look for survivors, spend 3 short minutes cracking a problem that 18 months of research couldn't dent, and then go on a 2001-style excursion that's lacking style, structure and a point.

Tim Robbins manages to deliver possibly the worst performance of his life, with supporting awfulness from Gary Sinise and Don Cheadle, under the surprisingly awful direction of the usually excellent Brian De Palma.

This movie is a fantastic case study into those minimum requirements that allow a movie to grab the audience's interest. It covers a number of bases. Much of this is taken from my reading of a book by screenwriting authority Robert McKee called Story: Substance, Structure, Style and The Principles of Screenwriting - quite possibly the bible of screenwriting.

PACE. There isn't any. Air is venting from a spaceship and people are likely to die. One guy doesn't have time to go fetch his spare helmet, one member of the crew is going to reboot the computers by ripping out some wires and the third is going to fix the holes by going on an EVA, but he's going to move really slowly because there's no real sense of urgency. We watch for hours on end as what should have been an emergency procedure drilled into them from months of practice turns into a badly improvised botch job carried out in slow motion as all the air leaks out of their ship. We should have walked away with a sense that the crew were hardened professionals, instead they look like they have no idea what they're doing.

The moments that are supposed to be high-tension are carried out in such painstakingly long and repetitive sequences that I was frantically wishing the damn film would get a move on. When a character dies in one of the most badly acted and scripted sequences of all time, it takes so long that my only thought during the pathetic melodramatic failure was "hurry up and die already", all sympathy for the character having long since evaporated.

DEUS EX MACHINA. You're not supposed to use it - it's cheap and it solves problems without supporting the internal consistency of the story. Coincidence is a major driver of this movie. They just happen to intersect the orbit of the only other vessel circling Mars, thus having their lives saved by chance. They just happen to land just before a storm, they just happen to get hit by meteors, they just happen to establish their base camp 16km from the artifact prior to its discovery.

VALUE SHIFT. To engage, a story has to fundamentally alter the values in its world. At the end of the movie, some of the most central values have to have shifted in some way as a consequence of the events that have unfolded. At the beginning and end of each sequence, some value has to have changed that actually matters in some way to the viewers and to the characters. This doesn't happen at any point in the entire movie, resulting in a feeling that there is really nothing of interest happening, despite the fact that they've travelled all the way to Mars and are exploring an unknown artifact.

EXPECTATIONS. The essence of excitement and interest in movies is often driven by our expectations of what will happen next, and what actually happens. The movie gives us too few facts and data to form any real expectations. When things do happen, they tend to be unrelated to the actions of the crew (a random meteor storm, for example). As a consequence, you quickly learn not to care about what the crew are doing because their actions are going to be pretty irrelevant. They are mere spectators in a sequence of events that happens around them regardless of their reactions to them.

As a follow-on to that, COHERENCE is important. You need to feel that the scenes and sequences interact with each other in some way. That things that happen earlier somehow set up our expectations regarding the characters, their actions and their feelings. This provides internal consistency to the movie and renders the whole thing a story rather than just a sequence of events. There's little tie-in between scenes other than they happen in chronological order. Of all the events in the movie, I only managed to find two things that were set up beforehand, one is a stupid Flash Gordon necklace that is used in the most clichéd and melodramatic way possible, and the second is a dance-related moment in zero-G that could have been cut from the whole film without affecting it at all (because it fails to set up what it is supposed to prepare us for, because it's badly scripted and filmed). There are few scenes in the whole film that are essential to its story, and most of the rest feels like filler.

The whole thing, in the words of Bilbo Baggins, feels "like butter scraped over too much bread". There's not enough real material in the movie to make a movie, and as such we spend considerable amounts of time watching a very few events unfold, destroying the movie's pace and forcing the characters to spend much time on screen waiting for nothing to happen.

So unless you really want to see what McKee meant about substance, structure and style by looking at a piece of work in which they are all absent, please follow this advice: Avoid succumbing to the temptation, as I did, of watching this movie because it looks like it might be a semi-dramatic or interesting space opera - it isn't worth seeing, not for 8 bucks, not for 3 bucks, not for free - it's a waste of 2 hours.