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Mission to Mars© James C. Hess
It was bound to happen, although I thought Stanley Kubrick would be cold in the ground before it did:
That someone is movie director Brian DePalma, and the effort that desires to lay claim to this status is "Mission to Mars". "Mission to Mars", superficially, comes across as the heir apparent to Kubrick. It is smart, it is somewhat original in concept and execution. It has a few ideas that could interesting. But. . . There are elements here that are just too much. "Mission to Mars" begins with an astronaut's backyard picnic that is so sweet you genuinely wonder if you could contract diabetes just by watching the screen. There are conversations that are much too long and and scenes that are here as time-fillers. There is quiet when sound is needed, and there is stuff here than seems dredged from Roger Corman's slag heap. Oh, dear. I am wandering, much like director DePalma does throughout the entire effort. The plot involves a manned mission to Mars, which lands without incident, and then. . . well, predictably, encounters. . . something. Something that claims the life of three of the crew members, causes a loss of radio contact with the fourth crew member, Luke Graham (Don Cheadle), and, through lurches and lunges, launches the narrative. More or less. As such efforts--science fiction--go, a rescue mission is dispatched, led by co-pilots Woody Blake (Tim Robbins) and Jim McConnell (Gary Sinise), with Connie Nielsen as Terri Fisher, Blake's wife, and Jerry O'Connell as the fourth crew member. You know, having seen more than a few movies like this one, what comes next: The rescue crew runs into a glut of tiny meteorites, which punctures the hull of the ship, resulting in a loss of air pressure inside the ship. Here, though, "Mission to Mars" steps away from the quality filmmaking Stanley Kubrick was known for, and engages in moviemaking that would probably make Ed Wood cringe: McConnell (Sinise) defies rationale and logic by refusing to wear his suit, drawing oxygen from it. And staying alive. But never mind. Then there is another crisis at hand to address, which leads to a sort-of-believable life-or-death situation. Eventually the rescue mission gets to Mars, finds the lone survivor, wait as he repeats his story (apparently this is for people who were at the snack bar or in the bathroom), and then are led into a, well, I guess it was meant to be a virtual reality version of a close encounter of some kind ala homage to "2001". Go To Page: 1 2 |
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