Mission to Mars (2000)
Director: Brian De Palma
Stars: Gary Sinise, Connie Nielsen, Tim Robbins, Don Cheadle and Jerry O'Connell
Allow me to be clear from the out set, I believe strongly that Brian De Palma is the best film maker within the pantheon of great American directors and this article/review will be about his greatness. His greatness is impressive and under appreciated, that's why. I specify that he is the best film maker explicitly because that is the limit of his greatness. Brian De Palma = best at explaining stuff through moving pictures, that's it. Other directors, Martin Scorceses and Clint Eastwoods may get better stories than Brian and may make more enduring and better received films, but Brian De Palma in a number of crucial technical senses makes the best movies. Maybe someone like Walter Hill or some foreigner could hold a candle to him, but they're not famous enough or American enough to play into this equation. Bearing my irrational fandom in mind (I literally decided he was the best at some point last year and am sticking to it), I was shocked to learn that Brian De Palma had directed Mission to Mars.
Somehow I had gotten the notion that he directed the film Red Plant instead. Red Planet came out about the same time as Mission to Mars and somehow I got mixed up.
Since I am currently in a process of seeing all of Brian De Palma's films again, it came as quite a joy to discover my error. Especially since I watched Red Planet again and found it less than great. There is a specific scene in the film in which Valkimer is head banging while looking out an overexposed window looking out at space. It is a vapid shot that for me encapsulates the vapidness of that whole mess. I still enjoy that film for its visual appeal especially the very end when Trinity catches Valkimer in the airlock wearing an awesome space suit.
You must understand that my commitment to understanding De Palma's magic is epic. In high school I saw The Untouchables and Carlito's Way and was struck. Both of those films held something very special in them and it certainly isn't their stories. Without getting into it too far at this point, those films, specifically the more action oriented scenes of Mafia gundowns and drug deals gone awry, are shot with a sense of forensic, spatial clarity difficult to find in almost any other director's works. One of my other favorite things about Brian DePalma is that he gave us Robert De Niro, who before shacking up with Martin Scorsese worked with another of America's greatest film makers, Brian De Palma, first. The film is called Greeting. It is a great film, up there with Joe and Easy Rider when it comes to movies about hippies and freaks. If you can find Greetings, you are good at finding rare titles and are lucky, because it is a joy. Compare the Pornography in Greetings to the flashbacks in Sisters to see how De Palma laid the ground work for Peter Jackson's patent 'documentary footage' montages (He's done this in all his films). When I think of Jackson's Forgotten Silver, I think that the exact sort of mocumentary eye at work was first developed by De Palma. It's a more visceral sense of mocument more akin to The Blair Witch Project or Tim and Eric: Awesome Show Great Job! than This is Spinal Tap and that fair. De Palma in Greetings uses the affect of different visual media (here 16 mm pornographic films of the late 60s) to develop a specific tone in the story. Similarly the flashbacks in Sisters are terrifying glimpses into the character's suppressed consciousness. They're cast in a grainy, black and white that brings to mind documentary footage and at least coincidentally refer to shots in Goddard's Alphavile.
All that confusion aside, when I started to watch Mission to Mars, I knew what I was looking for. Brian De Palma's greatest virtue is his ability to lay out a physical space through the visual medium of film, that enables both tension and resolution. To get at this I point to the classic blood bucket-prom scene in Carrie, where we see each part of the devious teens' plan implemented, each character is spatially positioned in a very palpable way relative to each other, their sight lines are super natural, pacing keeps us interested and movements are in a distinct sense correct. We see and don't see things come together seamlessly until the events culminate with the classic shot of Carrie on stage just before the bucket drops. We've been subliminally informed on all sides by invisible contextual elements. We see her there on stage and know about the girl to the top left of her holding the rope and the two people to the bottom right hidden beneath the stairs and though we can't see them their presence is looming. Again in Mission Impossible when Secret Agent Ethan Hunt meets his contact after things fall apart, De Palma builds through expert cinema an infectious spatial tension. Then the he blows up the giant aquarium.
In Mission to Mars I say De Palma is in top form. The film was unpopular likely because it went too far and got a bit schlocky even for me, though I understand they loved it in France. It could also be said that 'bad science' made this science fiction falter. And of course, the alien at the end (there is an alien kinda) is a bit lame. The film has everything Apollo 13 had (including Gary Sinise as practically the exact same character doing the exact same things) plus Mars plus an alien, but Mission to Mars didn't give me nightmares about being stuck in a space capsule slingshotting around the moon. In fact it gave me no nightmares at all, which I'm ok with.
For all the story's shortcomings De Palma manages to set up a few cinematic sequences that are lush and taught and totally rewarding. Here they are:
First, there is a shot in the rescue mission ship where we have a continuous shot that goes from simulated zero gravity into a gravitronic wheel a la 2001, where the laws of gravity apply. This actually happens twice, once with Jerry O'Conell and again with Gary Sinise. I have no idea how this was done. It is so subtle that, like the first shot of Orson Welles' Touch of Evil or the Black Dahlia for that matter, you don't even recognize how awesome a thing you've seen once you've seen it. Like the Indians couldn't see the ships.
Second, Tim Robbins floats out into space. I have never seen this happen in any other space movie: someone drift slowly into a planet's atmosphere. De Palma lays this out with such intelligence. The crew of the rescue vessel are in trouble when their engines explode and they loose all control. The crew decides to leave the ship and space walk to a satellite, which they can then maneuver to the surface. Apparently moving through the 3 dimensions of real space space is more confusing than any earthling could intuit. This part of the film is all about angles and distances. There is a tragic shot where Tim Robbin's movie-wife Connie Nielsen shoots a kind of rope gun at him hoping it will make it to him so he can be reeled in. We see him floating slowly away and she's getting closer and then shoots the gun and we know already that it will fall just short because of spatial cues provided by the precise cinematography. Here De Palma uses space as a vehicle for a tragic resolution not tension or ambiance.
My third and final favorite part of Mission to Mars is the sound analysis carried out by Don Cheadle's character. Films like Blow Out and Mission Impossible feature the other side of Brian De Palma's forensic genius, his adept use of sound. When the first crew approach a mountain on Mars in order to collect geographic recordings they encounter a truly bizarre sound. It is in this scene that a giant funnel of wind kills most of the initial characters. That's not important, what is is that we latter de-code the mystery sound and discover that it is in fact a pattern that describes the chemical structure of DNA. Now, this is a great part of the movie because as far as the audience can follow along they make the same profound discovery as the scientists and its neat and kinda unexpected. The problem with this part of the story and truly the final third of the film is that the DNA explanation makes no scientific sense and rather is out right wrong in some of its terms, calling nucleotides chromosomes, implying that DNA has a distinct beginning and end, and indicating that there is one sequence of DNA common to all life on Earth that we can easily identify. All this I was told by an actual scientist is non sense and makes the story a little hard to sit with. Still, there were far out sounds involved.
These are my three favorite things about Mission to Mars. I give the movie an A, like a 90%. That means I'll definitely watch it again some time probably in the next five years. It does fall short in many respects but makes up for it by being exceptionally well made. This sentiment can be applied to many of De Palma's projects for instance The Black Dahlia, which I think of a classic Wellesian noir or Snake Eyes, which is next on my list to watch again.
I implore you reader to give Brian De Palma a try and come at it with limited expectations. Expect craftsmanship and you will be rewarded. Expect to bite your nails and cry or laugh and you'll be disappointed. Think of it as being as good for you as Sudoku without being a form of subliminal advertising.
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