Low-hanging fruit.

Cruisin’ for a Contusion.

Tom Cruise is espionage agent Ethan Hunt, in the big screen reboot of the 1966 television series, MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE, who has to go rogue against his own agency to weed out a mole. But the agency thinks it’s him! (I don’t blame them – with that insufferable smirk and that mole-ish snout of his.)

Nonetheless, man-toy Cruise fires up the rocket sauce in this edge-of-the-seat, seat-of-the-pants heist thriller. And twenty years after its release, this film still holds up as one of the best, if not the best MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE movie.

Maybe because it’s directed by the inimitable Brian De Palma (CARRIE, SCARFACE). Maybe because it’s co-written by David Koepp (JURASSIC PARK) and Robert Towne (CHINATOWN). Maybe it’s the cavalcade of stars, hot off other films: Cruise (smarming from 1994’s INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE), Jean Reno as Ethan’s partner Krieger (powering from 1994’s LEON), veteran Jon Voight as team leader Phelps (1995’s HEAT), French bombshell Emmanuelle Beart as Phelps’s wife, Kristin Scott Thomas (from 1994’s FOUR WEDDINGS AND A FUNERAL), and Ving Rhames as Ethan’s hacker Luther (still searing from 1994’s PULP FICTION). Even Emilio Estevez – here as Agent Who Dies First – was still making movies that people went to see (admit it – you saw JUDGMENT NIGHT on the marquee strength of Emilio’s name alone!).

Whatever makes MISSION so good, Tom Cruise (also in his first role as producer, with his new company, Cruise/Wagner Productions) makes up for his obnoxious smirk by performing all his breath-stopping stunts himself. Was it here we first discovered that Cruise had a predilection for risking his own neck? He deferred his usual gigantic acting fee to be able to insure that smug pretty face against all the stunts in this actioner, none better than the explosive one we see in that magnificent trailer – Cruise being blown off a helicopter, careening towards the camera and landing with a thud so hard, it rattles our coccyx. It’s every bit as sensational as the hype.

During the first nail-biting mission (where we see one of MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE’s great conceits – those lifelike rubber facemasks), Ethan’s full team is killed mysteriously, and sole survivor Ethan is accused of being the killer mole by agency head Kittridge (Henry Czerny). On the run from his own agency, Ethan goes deep rogue, with other “disavowed” agents – Krieger and Luther – to find the real mole.

The plot revolves around a NOC list (Non-Official Cover) of all IMF (Impossible Mission Force) agents. And who’s got it. And who wants it. Ethan makes a deal with a saucy Vanessa Redgrave (as a mob boss) to offer him protection from IMF, before infiltrating CIA headquarters to steal a copy of the NOC for her.

Thus, the now-infamous, iconic visual of Tom Cruise hanging from suspension cables above a lighted, touch-sensitive floor. In a stunt stolen from Jules Dassin’s 1964 film, TOPKAPI (with Maximilian Schell on the wire), De Palma and Cruise ratchet the suspense to mind-bending proportions with updated technology, judicious editing and dangling man-toy. Much like Travolta’s iconic scoliosis pose represents disco, this visual – of a person suspended by hips, with arms and legs outstretched – has become synonymous with “spy,” satirized and spoofed in countless media since then.

The Knife-Dance, just before it gets REALLY sexy.

Holding Ethan from above is Krieger, in an air shaft– okay, forget the fact that, like every impregnable or inescapable building, the CIA building – the most secure edifice in the world – also has air shafts big enough for a man to crawl through. These are the face-palms for every small thing the movie gets wrong, almost canceling out every big thing it gets right. Now while Krieger struggles to hold Ethan aloft, a rat comes shuffling towards him in the air shaft– Waitaminute! This is THE most secure room in CIA headquarters – so clean, even a 2-degree change in room temperature or a five-decibel rise in noise sets off alarms – and they’ve got vermin problems? And is it a rat’s natural instinct to walk towards a human?

Also, while we’re in this ultra-secure, mega-protected, maxi-douche clean room, take a look at that “chair” that the computer tech (Rolf Saxon) pulls out from beneath the computer. He has to straddle it like a saddle. Just getting in an out of that chair looks so… cumbersome… How long can you sit in that saddle position and work on a computer?

Soon, the computer Tech will cross the line into computer Nerd – when he takes a seat in the cafeteria and pulls out a newspaper, and a smokin’ hot hard-9 sidles in next to him (Emmanuelle Beart, who spikes his coffee). She invades his personal space and he doesn’t even give her the Askew Glance (that surreptitious eye-rape that man-kind has perfected since the time of skirts made from leopard skins)! I can believe a guy can hold another man’s weight on a pulley whilst slicing a rat in half, I believe a rubber facemask can fool people into thinking you’re someone else, I believe a pilot can fly a helicopter into a tunnel dragged by a bullet train… but a guy NOT sneaking a peek at a hard-9? I call BULLSHIT. The male autonomous response to a female sitting that close to you is to at least start a conversation with nothing to say, even if the endgame of getting panty is a mission impossible. That body heat, that fuck-me skirt, so up in your bizness, she can plant a homing device on his shoulder. But Nerd keeps his back studiously turned, opens his paper to the dork pages and keeps reading.

Further, to work in a room with that level of security, don’t you think they would hire someone less of a dipstick? The “type” that would operate that room would be an Ethan Hunt type, trained in spywork, wetwork, and hero poses, in order to keep as many infiltrators at bay; someone who wouldn’t be duped into something as juvenile as letting his drink get spiked, someone who would TURN AROUND AND TALK TO THAT CHICK, MAN!

The final action sequence is so audacious that we can’t help but marvel in slack-jawed disbelief, while Lalo Schifrin’s magnificent Mission Impossible Theme is run through its paces by composer Danny Elfman; as a helicopter is dragged into a tunnel by a bullet train with two guys fighting on the roof of the train, trying to get to the helicopter! Then – that stunt from the trailer. And movie leaves us as breathless and spent as Tom Cruise’s coccyx.

Meanwhile, Luther is avoiding capture by employing the patented STAR WARS Rebel Method of stopping people getting through doors, by holding the door shut with all his strungth like a Mens… He’s the computer hacker, but his technology for door jamming is right up there with those Imperial soldiers on that ledge shielding their eyes from the planet-destroying Death Star beam with their forearms.

Long after we’ve forgotten what the NOC list is, we will remember the force with which MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE threw us back in our seats, we will remember the physicality of the bone-crushing stunts, we will remember that the plot hinged on a dork not talking to a hot chick, and we will remember Tom Cruise’s dangling man-toy.

END

Unholiest, Bloodiest, Blondest.

CARRIE starts with blood. And ends with blood. Startling gouts of life-giving/death-dealing blood. And in between – menstruation, high school, and religious dementia. A true horror movie.

Director Brian De Palma brings Stephen King’s 1974 debut novel Carrie to the big screen in blood and strawberry blonde: Sissy Spacek as Carrie White, perfectly embodying the awkward teen schoolgirl outcast, Piper Laurie sufficiently deranged as Carrie’s biblically-insane religious Mama; sweet curvaceous Nancy Allen as Bad Girl Chris Hargensen; striking Amy Irving as Good Girl Sue Snell, and angular Betty Buckley as sympathetic gym teacher Miss Collins (changed from Ms. Desjardin in the novel). All blonde. All the time.

First period. Bleeding in the shower of the girls’ locker room. Terrified, Carrie cries out for help; we realize she does not understand what menstruation is. Taunted, girls jeering, tampons thrown at her, school principal callous, distraught, Carrie rushes home. We meet Mama, and immediately understand: “Why didn’t you tell me, Mama?” Instead of a sympathetic ear, wild-eyed Mama drags Carrie screaming to The Prayer Closet and locks her in, preaching brimstone for the “sinfulness” of Carrie’s period and that she must pray until forgiven by god. Bloodied Christ on the cross looking down and lending a horror hand.

With her dire ascent into adulthood, Carrie realizes she has gained telekinetic ability – the power to manipulate objects with her mind; devours books on the subject in the library. (Note for young readers: “book” – noun, a written or printed work consisting of pages glued together along one side and bound in a cover. Can be read like any online blog. “Library” – noun, a building containing a collection of books, i.e. olden days internet.)

Teen girl, anti-social, unpretty, confused, bullied incessantly, browbeaten religiously… now with the power to retaliate, with the world as her weapon…

And now – the Boys: there’s a blond (of course!) and a brunette. And like so many movies and shows that feature this duo type, the pretty blond whom we think will conquer the world falls by the wayside in favor of the dark rogue: BOSOM BUDDIES (Scolari and Hanks), STAR WARS (Hamill and Ford), MAD MAX (Goose and Max), BILL & TED’S EXCELLENT ADVENTURE (Winter and Reeves), GALLIPOLI (Lee and Gibson)… Here, the blond is William Katt as curlicued Tommy, the nonstop dreamiest boy in school and Sue’s boyfriend, whom she cajoles into taking Carrie to the prom, feeling remorse for her bullying and wanting to sincerely atone by offering Carrie an innocent night with her sought after boytoy. (So sad that Katt’s only recognizable legacy is ultimately THE GREATEST AMERICAN HERO, 1981). While unrepentant Chris Hargensen dates a dark horse, a dreamy-eyed thug who can’t quite act, in his first featured film role “…and introducing John Travolta.” (In one short year, SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER would catapult Travolta into the night sky amongst the panoply of stars.)

This simple tale of revenge is unfurled creatively: screenwriter Lawrence D. Cohen hones King’s story to its barest emotional beats and director De Palma keeps us on edge by framing it furtively, like the angles a wild, caged animal might see. Once again disproving King’s own aphorism, “It is the tale, not he who tells it.” I’ve always disagreed with this simplistic notion. It is not the tale, but he who tells it. Were this straightforward juggernaut in the hands of a lesser director, well… just see what they did in 2002. (With that inferior remake, we can see how integral director and budget are to telling a tale. King has suffered much ignominy after his initial spate of quality adaptations (SALEM’S LOT, THE SHINING, THE DEAD ZONE), so he should be the first to admit that “the tale” is nothing without a good “teller.”)

For leading the bullying girls, unrepentant Chris is suspended from school (and the prom – heavens, no!), so plots to get even with Carrie, enlisting her Sweathog boyfriend to kill a real hog and drain its blood, planting the bucket above the stage at the prom hall. I tell ya, with all the Machiavellian plotting Chris achieves to place Carrie directly under that bucket on prom night, she should be either a politician or a hitman. Unravel one thread and the plot falls to pieces.

Thus, the iconic scenes of Carrie onstage during her one moment of joy – drenched in blood. A metaphor that teen girls and the teen guys trying to make them during the wrong phase of the moon are well acquainted with. De Palma splits his screen into comicbook frames, so we can see Carrie’s deathly stare and the results of her telekinetic retaliation simultaneously. With each mental strike, a violin shriek (PSYCHO copyrights be damned!). The school burns. All those who laughed now scream in agony. Because of its revenge premise, CARRIE has always seemed more visceral satisfaction than horror.

The horror is Jesus. And Mama’s ungodly love of him.

When Carrie stumbles home for solace in the arms of Mama, Jesus just won’t let Mama go, as he whispers in Mama’s ear that the devil in Carrie has to be killed with a big knife to the shoulder blades. Carrie’s last stroke is to crucify Mama with bladed implements. Back in 1976, these beats were not played offhandedly as nowadays they are, to a generation inured to creative one-dimensional violence. Back then, a daughter telekinetically stabbing her mother to death birthed a new horror genre. And we can see the emotional cost of each action on the characters’ faces. Sissy Spacek and Piper Laurie received Academy Award nominations for their performances.

And everyone lived blondely every after.

END

Hell on Earth, overlorded by Satan Bush.

Iraq calls America The Great Satan.

REDACTED shows us why. Written and directed by Brian de Palma, we follow a small cadre of American troops for a few explosive havoc days of rape and murder in Samara, Iraq. Based on a real account of the rape and murder of a 15-year-old Samara girl, I researched the web for this particular incident… and ended up reading dozens of other cases.

I stopped searching. Nothing unique about this movie’s incident. It had become common practice with the ignorant thugs who had become the lowest swine on the planet – the Amerikan Military. (An Iraqi soldier comments that REDACTED shows one rape – while he has witnessed thousands.)

…And the Great Satan coalesces, laughing worms.

Almost a retelling of De Palma’s own CASUALTIES OF WAR (1989), where dehumanization of Vietnamese created a brain cloud of callousness in the American military that caused more terrorism towards the race they were supposedly aiding (that movie’s plot, like REDACTED, also involved the rape and murder of a local girl). REDACTED shows us how modern American Military in Iraq, like mongrels off their leashes, also inculcated to dehumanize their enemy, create more terrorism towards Iraqis than the other way ’round. And – at the risk of sounding like a broken record – one man bears the brunt of this blame: George W. Bush.

In the final telling, Bush must answer for over 2 million lives, American and Middle Eastern – lives lost, destroyed, displaced, diverted for no reason other than his warped megalomania and tyranny. “We’re fighting them over there so we won’t have to fight them over here,” never takes into account that is EXACTLY where jihadists want Americans – “over there” saves on jet fuel and boat rides to kill infidels.

REDACTED opens with grunt Angel Salazar (Izzy Diaz) – a little too lucid and articulate for a PFC named Angel Salazar – filming and narrating on his vidcam, setting us up for disjointed storytelling (“shit happens”) and non-Hollywood editing (cos it’s his vidcam, see?), but absolutely failing to sell it. Film aims so hard at being “reality TV” (by being lensed through various security cams, embedded reporter footage, hidden terrorist cams, cellphone video, online wives’ videos, Arabic website footage, etc. – there are no actual “movie camera” master shots and cutaways), that the “natural” acting is anything BUT.

The first action vignette is beautifully staged, as soldiers fight to keep their eyes open at a dull checkpoint, while Handel’s Sarabande in D minor lulls us into a false sense of quietude. De Palma plays this scene like a French documentary, showing us the complications at just this one checkpoint. As the American troops describe how they’ve set up extensive Iraqi signage outlining checkpoint procedures, a French narrator tells us that studies show over half of Iraqis are illiterate; which means most of them cannot read the instructions and have no idea of checkpoint protocol at the Terrorist Amerikan Checkpoints.

After nothing happening all day, all hell breaks loose when a car doesn’t stop at its prescribed point. A pregnant woman is killed, and we see the massacre through the eyes of a non-American news report.

Removing us from provincial American reportage enables us to perceive the incident with clearer vision; then de Palma drops us back into the ignorant provincialism of the American grunt camp; utterly remorseless and flippant, they refuse to comprehend how other cultures might misinterpret their hand signals or speech, blaming the driver for the massacre.

Many would argue that these inmate-mentality drogues are not representative of American soldiers. But REDACTED raises the horrifying reality that these are not the exception – they are the rule. We would know this if the information dribble from war zones was not being “redacted” by the duplicitous government (whole pages, lines and incriminating evidence obscured or removed from reports before being released to the public). Like “Rendition” or “Enhanced Interrogation,” Redacted is merely another Great Amerikan Euphemism.

The swinish Bushies will protest, “It’s only a movie!” But even if we negate the atrocities these soldiers perpetrate, the checkpoints in that foreign land are a reality – CAUSING more violence and death than they curb (which Bush and his cabbagehead general, Petraeus, and puppetfool Bremer, refuse to acknowledge). “Over a 24-month period, U.S. troops killed 2,000 Iraqis at checkpoints. 60 were confirmed insurgents. No U.S. soldiers were charged in any of these incidents.”

Even if you consider the majority of soldiers as not criminally insane or unbalanced and just “doing their jobs,” their “jobs” involve performing unnecessarily belligerent tasks instituted in that foreign nation FOR NO REASON. On the basis of lies.

Salazar’s fellow grunts are stereotypes we’ve seen in all these movies before, with one difference – they’re not the heroes. Even more so than in LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA, the American grunts are the villains. Unknowns, so audiences won’t automatically imbue them with screen-love; Patrick Carroll and Daniel Stewart Sherman play Flake and Rush (is he called Rush because he’s fat and ignorant like Limbaugh?), while Blix is a sympathetic Kel O’Neill. Kel Who–? Exactly.

So that when the hard bigotry falls out of these guys, we accept it: “nuke ’em all… scorched earth… sand niggers… ragheads… dwarf Ali Babas…” every insult you’ve ever heard is compacted into this movie.

These grunts have no idea what the bigger picture is – it is not their job to know – yet they don’t even know what their SMALLER duties are. At one point, Rush grabs documents in an Iraqi home, to discern whether “it can help with the war” – while the occupants protest and their translator is nowhere to be found.

Has anyone considered that maybe George W. Bush PLANNED it this way? Not thoroughly of course, but in that bovine, meathead, remedial-reading way he does everything; spreading abject “terrorism” amongst the people whom he believes are responsible for terrorizing the United States. Is he that puny-brained to exact revenge vicariously through innocents? A whole country as charnel house to satisfy the bloodlust of his own latent terrorist streak.

The Amerikan Military and Propaganda Government have dehumanized the Iraqis so morbidly that American grunts feel entitled to these objects as “spoils of war”; premeditating and performing the rape and murder of the 15-year-old girl was just another rowdy frat night for the rapists, even though some of the troop protested – but not enough to actually STOP the incident.

Grunts have been indoctrinated to believe they are performing a FAVOR for Iraq by “overthrowing Saddam, bringing democracy to them – and not even a thank you!” Yet the fact that their christian feet are on islamic soil only increases the hostility – an Arab religious tenet is to keep non-islamic feet off their “holy” land. But George W. Bush will never “get” it.

As revenge for the 15-year-old girl, Salazar is kidnapped and beheaded by Iraqis. But now de Palma shows us the American version of this news, and we see exactly how deluded and in denial the American government keeps itself, as a military spokesman talks of the “barbaric and brutal nature of the terrorists and their complete disregard for human life.”

And though Blix wants to bring charges against his own men, the first thing that comes into question in American courts is the sanity of the soldier bringing the charges. The frustration of this insular system of denial and protectionism will make your head swell and smoke come out your ears.

Ironically, de Palma’s movie ends with redactions that the movie studios made before release, in a last brutal segment called “Collateral Damage – Actual pictures from the Iraq War.” We do not see every picture de Palma intended us to see. But we see enough: children with burned skin, screaming. Families holding their heads, screaming, while their child lies slaughtered on the ground; a man cradling his naked son, covered in blood; splotches of blood all over a screaming child’s dress; a dead woman with eyes wide open, lying in a pool of blood, her limbs removed. This last picture is apparently the Samara girl.

And only one question raises its ugly, swollen weasel head:

WHEN WILL THE GREAT SATAN, GEORGE W. BUSH, BE BROUGHT TO JUSTICE?

END

Ground Control to Major Tom
Take your protein pills and put your mascara on…

Mission To Farce.

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.

Poffy roving redundantly.

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 Houston, We Have a Problem.

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 dialogue 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