"Mission to Mars"

In space, no one can hear you jeer.

By Andrew O'Hehir

Mar 10, 2000 | Once upon a time, when Hollywood filmmakers wanted to depict the first meeting between humans and aliens, it was simple: They wrapped a guy in tin foil, put a percolator on his head and called in the military. Then, sometime around 1977 (the year of "Close Encounters of the Third Kind"), the aliens became ethereal New Age beings, bathed in light, with Important Lessons to teach us. Now we can't get rid of the little bastards.

Take Brian De Palma's "Mission to Mars." I'm sure everyone involved with this clumsy and dispiriting attempt at space opera hopes it's rapidly forgotten. But that's not going to be easy. This isn't merely a big-budget dud with a name director; it's the sort of spectacularly misguided A-list movie that invites superlatives. Is it worse than "Ishtar"? Worse than "Waterworld"? Worse than "The Sicilian"? (Definitely, probably and maybe not, respectively.) Wherever it ranks in the pantheon of badness, "Mission to Mars" is startlingly inept from start to finish -- it's atrociously written, poorly shot and edited and fatally unfocused. I've seen plenty of worse movies, but most of them were cheap and cynical. This is an honest, earnest epic that fails on every level.

Furthermore, "Mission to Mars" establishes a new gold standard for embarrassing alien encounters; it'll make you positively pine for the guy with the coffeepot on his noggin. Words cannot describe the feeble sentimentality of this film's conclusion, and anyway, you should be allowed to inflict its dumb-ass secrets on yourself if you so choose. Let's leave it at this: Bambi meets Ally McBeal in an audiovisual presentation out of eighth-grade science class.

Long before its disastrous climax, "Mission to Mars" feels like a grievously poor fit between director and material. It's a slow and drearily expensive film that stitches together fragments from other, better space-exploration movies without ever sustaining any suspense or narrative energy. De Palma's many fans will argue that appropriation is part of his genius, and I agree, but he's never before been so blatant and witless about it.

Most obviously, "Mission to Mars" draws many of its details, large and small, from Stanley Kubrick's inscrutable "2001: A Space Odyssey," right down to the doughnut-shaped spacecraft and the astronauts' wraparound visors. But even if "2001" is in some respects an empty-headed film, its creators certainly thought it was about something. "Mission to Mars" reminds me a little of "Star Trek: The Motion Picture," the Enterprise crew's first big-screen foray; both are films about machines, in which people are only props.

The digital Martian landscapes created by De Palma and his army of collaborators are suitably impressive and provide moments of spooky atmosphere. But the movie is so dense with elaborate computer effects and matte paintings that the director gets almost no chance to show off his trademark bravura camerawork. Even such inherently engaging performers as Tim Robbins and Gary Sinise can do little amid the noise and murk. As always, Robbins is good-natured and Sinise wears his ambiguous sneer, but their characters are cardboard adventure-guy cutouts, dwarfed by the filmmakers' labored efforts to create an epic.

I'm something of an agnostic when it comes to De Palma, but he's unquestionably a director of consummate style and skill, one whose most popular films -- from "Carrie" to "Scarface" to "The Untouchables" -- have become tremendously influential in contemporary cinema. Sometimes his cannily constructed thrillers (like "Dressed to Kill" or "Blow Out") have struck me as soulless, even sadistic, technical exercises, slavishly devoted to the gospel of Alfred Hitchcock. But one thing De Palma has never been, until now, is a crashing bore.

For all the outrageous expense and technical wizardry of "Mission: Impossible," it was an action movie, full of exciting stunts and conducted at the pulse-elevating pace where De Palma is most at home. You might call "Mission to Mars" a stasis movie. It lumbers along, full of miniatures and animated backdrops, its actors more often than not weighed down and made anonymous by their bulky spacesuits. De Palma seems imprisoned both by the film's elaborate settings and by its leaden, telegraphic dialogue.

The screenplay is by Jim Thomas, John Thomas and Graham Yost, from a story by the Thomases and Lowell Cannon, which means "Mission to Mars" is a textbook violation of the inflexible Rule of Three (invented by me): Any film with more than three credited writers is invariably crap.

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