A quarter of a century has passed since director Brian De Palma’s Mission to Mars. As we re-evaluate the cinema of 2000, does it stand up to scrutiny?
This is the latest in AJ Black’s series of features on films released in the year 2000. He previously looked back at Curtis Hanson’s drama, Wonder Boys. Potential spoilers lie ahead…
At the tail end of the 90s, and before the rise of franchises, every year was marked by films which covered similar blockbuster ground.
1996 had aliens with Independence Day and soon after through a comedy lens in 1997’s Men In Black or Mars Attacks! That same year brought us the ‘volcano’ movies – Volcano and Dante’s Peak, both front-lined by rugged men of action. 1998 was the ‘asteroid’ year, marked by Michael Bay’s excess in Armageddon and the more philosophical (and far superior) Deep Impact. 2000’s variant on this trend was the Mars mission, with critical misfire Red Planet dropping at the tail end of the year, and before it Brian de Palma’s Mission to Mars, arguably the better of the two films, which projected humanity deeper into the 21st century and toward the next frontier. We remained hopeful, back then, that humanity might reach for the stars. Twenty years on, the best we can hope for is that Donald Trump’s vaunted ‘Space Force’ ends up with eggs on its vacuumed face.
Mission To Mars, in a quirk of fate, actually takes place in the year 2020. The Mars mission, in an even stranger quirk, launches in the film on my birthday. My 38th birthday wasn’t marked by another giant leap for humanity, but rather a sunny but oppressive Covid-19 summer lockdown, which places Mission To Mars even more firmly in sci-fi territory. Mars missions are promised or hoped for perhaps in the 2030s, and now Red Planet’s 2056 looks far more likely. That is, if we have a habitable planet to launch from by then.
Mission To Mars, as a result, is optimistic about our chances as a species, in a similar vein to 1997’s Contact, from Robert Zemeckis. They’re films with different journeys but similar destinations. Both ride the crest of western hopes in the 1990s that we may be about to embark, in the 21st century, on a great new adventure. That makes it all the more disappointing that Mission To Mars, the first high-concept blockbuster movie released in 2000 – its only real challenger on opening weekend being Roman Polanski’s Johnny Depp-starring slow burn horror The Ninth Gate – is an underwhelming, strangely mournful and frequently corny experience.
Perhaps the most striking element of Mission To Mars, however, is that although it was directed by Brian De Palma, unquestionably one of the finest directors of his era, it could honestly have been made by just about anyone.
The project didn’t originate from De Palma, which goes some way to explaining why this feels like an aberration when compared to much of his other work. It was the epitome of a factory-line product, based on the Disney theme park ride of the time, constructed by (nevertheless talented) screenwriters John and Jim Thomas and Graham Yost for an unnamed director who subsequently left the project.
De Palma, as a director for hire, presumably needed the money. His previous film, the uneven Nicolas Cage-starring Snake Eyes (from which he steals Gary Sinise for this film) and his barnstorming reboot of Mission: Impossible were pure De Palma: full of Dutch angles and twisty-turny potboiling plots. Mission To Mars, by contrast, heads in the direction you expect from the beginning.
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Granted, this is less De Palma’s fault than it is the script, which seems determined to place a ‘Disneyfied’ sheen on a story which is otherwise sombre and dark. Don Cheadle’s astronaut Luke gets stuck on the red planet, prefiguring Matt Damon’s traveller in The Martian (a much superior film treading similar ground) by going native. Humanity’s first mission to Mars is filled with death and destruction; Sinise’s Jim is still reeling from the tragic loss of his wife and has to fight to regain the trust of NASA and his colleagues.
Tim Robbins’ ostensible lead Woody suffers a horrific, albeit self-inflicted, death by space vacuum halfway through the film. It’s not a laugh a minute romp. Yet it also tries to inject moments of levity, or romance, or awkward humour, which never tonally sit right with each other. I mentioned Contact previously – to its credit, Zemeckis committed to the serious, perhaps even earnest quest by Jodie Foster’s lead Ellie to find alien life, and it never really tried to be funny.
Mission To Mars wants to be entertaining and family friendly while also being melancholic and philosophical.
You can see why this concoction might struggle to come together, especially when Robbins or Connie Nielsen (as his quite reckless younger wife) or Jerry O’Connell are gamely chewing up and spitting out lines like, “Some couples dance, others go to Mars”. Indeed Robbins’ character is so relentlessly upbeat and pragmatic, even in the face of certain and impending death, that he’s hard to believe he could exist as an actual person. Mission To Mars fails in the one area it believes it shines: character.
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While possessing decent actors in those roles, the ensemble cast can’t make average material on the page come alive, which leaves De Palma to do the heavy lifting with his visuals. There is one exception to this: Sinise. He feels like the one character the writers truly thought through and constructed the core narrative around, the only one who undertakes a journey. In microcosm, he represents the journey of the human race. He survives adversity, is haunted by pain, and eventually is given the opportunity to break free and ascend by the extra-terrestrials of Mars. “To stand on a new world and look beyond it to the next one” is part of his justification for not returning to Earth, and Sinise sells it. His is the strongest performance that just about – just – makes the ending work.
And, let’s face it, Mission To Mars is a film defined by those last 20 minutes or so. Everything leading up to that, with extended barbecue cook outs which recall the all-American comradeship of Apollo 13 or The Right Stuff, or sequences in space where the mission goes desperately wrong, which Alfonso Cuaron’s Gravity later pulled off with far more intensity, it’s nevertheless finding the ‘Face on Mars’ and then the distinctly 2001: A Space Odyssey-styled conclusion that we’ve been waiting for. Red Planet’s eventual aliens are on the micro level, parasitic organisms which reflect the deeper scientific reality (even within the confines of escapism) of what we might find on Mars. But Mission To Mars is all about the Star Trek-style wonder, and plays with alien astronaut theory in a manner Ridley Scott would double down on a decade later with Prometheus.
In the ensuing two decades, as interest in alien life and ancient alien theory has died down compared to the sci-fi boom of the 90s, the Face on Mars – or Cydonia – has largely been debunked, but it is a strong and recognisable visual cue to sell an ending designed to invoke a sense of wonder backed by Ennio Morricone’s lush score. Even this, however, ends up strangely sedate and mournful, lacking the breath-taking mystery of Stanley Kubrick’s defining film about the human experience. Let’s also not talk about the ropey alien CGI that you’ll have seen better pulled off in a dozen videogames.
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The ending owes less to 2001 than it does the aforementioned Contact, and really that sums up just how much of a debt Mission To Mars owes to the 1990s in general. As the new century dawns, and particularly from our vantage point, it looks surprisingly old hat and painfully, hopelessly optimistic, even if the belief we can achieve such feats as reaching Mars and contacting ancient alien life will be tempered by loss and suffering feels more apt. Mission To Mars now feels as much on an artefact as the mysterious Cydonian face, and one that isn’t necessarily weathering well with age.
You can find A J. on social media, including links to his podcasts and books, via Linktr.ee here.
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