So it's perfectly natural
that Brian De Palma, the sometimes dubious, sometimes artful master of
film pastiche, has crafted his first space movie, Mission
to Mars, with numerous nods to Clarke's and Kubrick's revered 2001.
These nods includes De Palma's major theme: the encounter with alien life
as force for human enlightenment.
Master of homage
DePalma gives us a veritable
catalog from 2001: the tricks with gravity, an astronaut floating
to his doom in space, a sentient computer (even more effeminate than H.A.L.),
which has to be Turned Off. (In fact, the re-booting of computers seems
to be a pivotal plot point in at least two separate scenes.)
A robotic rover seen from
far above the dusty floor of Mars reminds you of C3PO and R2D2, from a
similar vantage point, wandering the desert planet Tatooine. If a certain
pie-faced alien looks familiar, it may be because you've seen it in about
a hundred other science fiction films.
Even the central plot twist
-- hidden until the film's final moments -- turns on a popular scientific
cliché. (I won't tell you any more than the film's tag line reveals:
"For centuries we've been looking for the origin of life on earth. We've
been looking on the wrong planet.")
De Palma is known for this
sort of thing, with remakes of the gangster movie Scarface and Antonioni's
Blow Up as well as his frequent nods to suspense master Alfred Hitchcock.
It's too easy to fault M2M
as an endless series of references, though, since Hollywood has built a
cottage industry of space movies by cannibalizing the past, rarely venturing
beyond boundaries long ago established by films such as 2001 and,
before that stories such as H.G. Wells's War
of the Worlds (which became Independence Day) and John
Campbell's "Who Goes There?" (which became The
Thing and then, indirectly, Alien).
De Palma photographs Mars
beautifully, as Kubrick would have done. On land, "Mars" is the Fraser
Sand Dunes near Vancouver, painted with 120,000 gallons of Mars Red latex
paint; shots from space come courtesy of green screen digital effects.
A new Martian Chronicle
At the sentimental heart
of De Palma's space movie is Ray Bradbury's masterpiece of science fiction,
The
Martian Chronicles. Unfortunately, the themes of the classic remain
obscure, lost somewhere in those sprawling, windswept Martian deserts.
M2M is
too clumsy to fully embrace the subtle elegance of Bradbury's prose. De
Palma may get his science right -- the details of spaceflight pour forth
-- where Bradbury was too much the fabulist, dreaming of canals, a breathable
atmosphere, and Martians who induce hallucinations or mutate into ghosts
of dead humans. But compared with its literary forebear, the soul of M2M
is as arid as its orange soil.
There are faint glimmers
of ghosts in the film. One is Maggie (Kim Delaney), the dead wife who inspires
astronaut Jim McConnell (Gary Sinise).
In a video recording he watches,
Maggie fires off the film's obligatory message: "Life reaches out for life."
When Jim says, "Maggie was the only one of us who believed there
might be something down there," chances are if you've seen Close Encounters
or Contact, you'll know what's going to happen, and to whom,
at the end of the movie.
M2M's blatant
commercial touches -- unlike those found in 2001 -- belie the intentions
of the film's dumbed-down plot. Instead of evoking the shape-shifting,
chimerical feeling of Bradbury's Martians, De Palma manipulates the building
blocks of life merely by giving us images of gravity-defying M&Ms,
Dr. Pepper, and of course, blood.
The one obvious reference
to the book is the Martian mask, which looks like it could have been taken
directly from the cover of the Bantam paperback edition of The Martian
Chronicles.
It's an apt symbol;
De Palma has shown us all his predecessors' surfaces but explored none
of the depths. In the end, that makes M2M far less than the sum
of its historical parts, another familiar story.
Frank Houston is a frequent
contributor to Salon and the New York Times.What
do you think? Send your comments to the editor.
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