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MISSION
TO MARS (Mar 2000)
Director: Brian de Palma.
Writers: Lowell Cannon, Jim Thomas, John Thomas, Graham Yost.
Starring: Gary Sinise, Tim Robbins, Don Cheadle, Connie Nielsen,
Jerry O'Connell, Armin Mueller-Stahl.
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Poffy
Roving Redundantly
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Mission
To Farce.
by
Jon Dunmore © 29 May 2006.
Mission
To Mars
stands every bit as tall as Capricorn One in the Ignorant
Space Movie category, exhibiting so many misdemeanors, misrepresentations,
misapplied physics laws, mistaken facts, missteps, mysterious
logic, and misapprehension of spacefaring dialect that one
wonders which second-grader took three months off school to
helm it.
Brian
de Palma - the dark force behind 1983's Scarface
- appends his name as director. But I think he's lying.
Starring
Don Cheadle as the Crazy Black Guy, Gary Sinise (wearing
more makeup than David Bowie on the Ziggy Stardust tour),
Tim Robbins as The Tragic Apple-Pie Hero, Connie Nielsen
as The Chick and Jerry O'Connell as The Fat Kid from Stand
By Me.
From
its first space scenes, the film trumpets its ignorance,
showing a remote rover aiding a manned mission on Mars.
Audiences are so conditioned to robot helpers in space cinema
(since Will Robinson and Dr. Smith leaned so heavily on
theirs for comedic side-kickery in Lost In Space of
the 60s) that they do not realize this particular rover's
superfluity. Rovers are reconnoiter craft for unmanned missions - consequently, this 26-million-dollar redundancy
would not exist in a space agency whose motto became "faster,
cheaper, better" to appease the ignorant, impatient
public and the even more ignorant, penny-pinching government.
(That only two of these three aspects can exist simultaneously
is another issue altogether. That is, you can have faster
and cheaper, but it won't be better; cheaper and better,
but it won't be delivered faster, etc.)
And
from there, it's downhill fast.
Mission
to Mars is so machine-gun riddled with one discrepancy
and fallacy after the next, that absolutely zero enjoyment
can be gleaned from the storyline, performances or the space
or planet backdrop effects.
Crazy
Black Guy gets stranded on Mars. Blatantly throwing logic,
budget, orbital mechanics and NASA protocol to the pigs,
Apple-Pie, The Chick, Fat Kid and Ziggy are sent to rescue
him. Another "launch window" to Mars is years
hence, yet these American Pie Heroes - working on the fact
that everyone in the film and the audience regard the launch
window as a McGuffin - go anyway. Launching outside a "launch
window" is not a "dramatic element that illustrates
dedication and Team Spirit" - it is an impossibility.
Without gravity assists (by flybys of Venus and Earth),
a spacecraft already constructed for such a journey would
have to be retrofitted to house inordinate amounts of additional
propellant, construction exigencies alone putting the mission
outside budget and payload constraints… No one can
just declare their heroic intentions and have everything
ready to go by Sunday - which is basically how Ziggy achieves
his launch; to save someone openly considered dispensable
by the space agency (who train scores of astronauts for
the same missions, for just such eventualities), who may
be a corpse anyway, considering all radio contact with him
was lost.
You
lost me at hello.
NASA
would more likely launch a mission to retrieve its ROVER,
which has more intelligence in its antenna than all the
astronauts combined.
Our
rescuers discover a giant
Face on Mars - that old 70's superstition from the Viking
1 probe photo. In a space age where we have already disproved
its existence, the film-makers opt to pander to conspiracy
theorists, pseudo-scientists, astrologers and imbeciles
who shun scientific evidence like the mystical "evil"
they have been inculcated to believe is tangible. In a technological
era that possesses extraterrestrial soft-landing spacecraft
(Mars Pathfinder, launched 1996) and high-altitude surveillance
(Mars Global Surveyor, launched 1996), given the fictional
year of this movie (supposedly 2020), even if we need to
regard The Face as "real" for the movie's dramatic
purposes, it should have been discovered decades before
these astro-nots landed.
Instead,
the movie ramps further into idiocy.
Near
Mars orbit, the rescuers abandon their exploding ship (more
obscene fallacies accompany the ship explosion than can
be catalogued here); though, leaving in a dead fall, they
still achieve enough orbital velocity to capture a supply
module already in orbit. (Again, absolutely no respect is
afforded physics laws, as Apple Pie fires up his jets and
points directly at the module to catch it - but with
the module in a lower orbit, he needs to fire his jets against
the direction of his higher orbit to attain that lower orbit.)
Upon impossibly reaching the module, Pie goes flying past
it as if he was in an atmosphere, setting up the most heinous
crime this movie could commit on the unquestioning minds
of its ape-like audience:
With
Pie's MMU (Manned Maneuvering Unit) out of fuel, Chick,
supposedly a trained astronaut, uses the same incorrect
directional jet burns and massive overacting to try to save
him. Pie tells her, "You can't catch me with your MMU,
honey. Their jets are designed for attitude control, not
travel." Information which probably should have been
learned at the Astronaut Academy, dontcha think? After the
mathematical impossibility of saving Pie is explained to
her like an idiot-child, she stops and - shoots a tether
cable at him! Remember that silly thing we learned in
grade school called Newton's Third Law of Motion: "For
every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction"?
Taking for granted that Chick has miraculously attained
orbital velocity of 28,000 kph, after shooting the tether,
she retains her relative position, steady as a rock,
in the vacuum of space - breaking one of the most fundamental
physics laws, while everything else around her continues
to adhere to those same laws! No one told Newton that enough
overacting piled on the Third Law would negate its physics.
Speciously
landing on Mars, Crazy Black Guy is found (spearing fish
and talking to a volleyball named Wilson), whereupon ensue
conversations about DNA that only a screenwriter with absolutely
no biology knowledge could appreciate. Their super-redundant
rover leads them into the Face on Mars, where they encounter
a tall alien being wearing a flowing number that would look
fabulous on Barbra Streisand.
Of
course, helmets - as in all space movies - are completely
arbitrary. Who knows why NASA spends so much useless time
engineering environment suits when every planet in the universe
- as Lost in Space taught us - already has a breathable
atmosphere? Before we can even ingest the next twenty stupidities
that the movie flings at us like ape-poo, helmets on Mars
are eschewed for the purpose of contractually appeasing
the pretty movie stars and their agents who insist on verifiable
screen time. (How else to prove it if there's that unfashionable
helmet obscuring the star's $500 hairstyle?)
Barbra shows them a solar system hologram - with all the
planets orbiting in the wrong direction (proving that there
are idiot screenwriters even on Mars) - and a nifty morphing
computer program which she bought from Michael Jackson,
showing that Life on Earth was seeded from Life on Mars.
Well, that accounts for all those Jerry Springer guests.
Every
aspect of the DNA scenes, zero-gee scenes and orbital mechanics
scenes is completely blundered from the dialog to the action
to the fallacious physics laws which go in and out of play
as the plot requires; spacecraft do not emit vapor trails;
sound does not propagate in a vacuum; galaxies don't look
that way in visible light; the atmosphere analyzer on Ziggy's
forearm shows "Nitrogen 56% Oxygen 20% Trace Gasses
1%" - the film-makers are so lazy that they do not
even bother to make the numbers add up to 100 percent!
Movie
writers always hide behind the pretext that movies are "only
entertainment" and should be taken less seriously.
Yet what kind of entertainment can be gleaned from a movie
with this much blatant disregard for the most basic tenets
of reality (such as: Humans Can't Breath On Mars)?
Why should society extol education and learning when this
demeaning and insidious disrespect for learning is lauded
with heathen funding and absolutely criminal promulgation?
If they say they are appealing to "the masses,"
how much of an insult is it to regard The Masses as this
imbecilic? Unfortunately, there will be many who, being
too young or underprivileged to have afforded an opportunity
for education in basic physics, will enjoy this film
- and thus the dumbing down of a generation acquires its
target long before that generation even knows what hit it.
Every
scientific fact that mankind has strove so hard to identify
is treated like so much dross by the ignoramuses who forged
this worthless and useless, deformed, retarded thing they
call a movie, that their greatest punishment will be having
to see their names attached to it for millennia to come.
END
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MISSION
TO MARS (Mar 2000)
Director: Brian de Palma.
Writers: Lowell Cannon, Jim Thomas, John Thomas, Graham Yost.
Starring: Gary Sinise, Tim Robbins, Don Cheadle, Connie Nielsen,
Jerry O'Connell, Armin Mueller-Stahl.
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