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The Mars movies keep coming and they aren't getting any better. In Ghosts of
Mars, director John Carpenter aims for neither the operatic emotionalism of Brian De
Palma's Mission to Mars nor the Star Trek-style message-making of Red Planet.
Carpenter is a pulp sensibility to the core, and his take on our neighboring planet
is meant to be pure, kinetic action with only the bare minimum of characterization and
expository detail.
The feeble story plays out like the mutant offspring of Carpenter's
version of The Thing, Night of the Living Dead,
and a Marilyn Manson concert. The year is
2176, and the colonization of Mars is underway. A
process called "terraforming" is nearly complete, giving the red planet a thin
but breathable atmosphere. A title card
informs us that the Martian settlement is "matriarchal," but Carpenter and
co-screenwriter Larry Sulkis don't seem to know what to do with this information beyond
concocting generic kick-butt action heroines for Natasha Henstridge and Pam Grier to play.
Henstridge (Species) and Grier
(Jackie Brown) are
the leaders of a police task force dispatched to mining colony Shining Canyon for a
prisoner transfer. The prisoner in question
is a dangerous killer with the improbable moniker Desolation Williams, and is played by
Ice Cube in a performance that pushes his glowering skills to their very limits. Also along for the ride is Guy Ritchie regular
Jason Statham as Henstridge's right-hand man, Jericho Butler. Butler apparently didn't get the memo about the
whole matriarchal society bit, as he sees this tense and perilous mission as a perfect
opportunity to try and get into Henstridge's pants. "Maybe
I'd sleep with you if you were the last man on Earth," she tells him, "but we're
not on Earth." That's as good as it
gets, folks.
As it turns out, Desolation Williams isn't such a bad guy after all. He's only been fighting back against the hapless
miners whose bodies have been taken over by the ghosts of a long-vanished Martian
civilization. The motives of these extinct
natives are not elaborated upon - we're left to assume they have a darn good reason for
turning the colonists into a bunch of Alice Cooper lookalikes with a taste for
decapitation and self-mutilation. Williams
and the cops join forces to battle the killer zombies and avoid being possessed
themselves.
What follows is the sort of undifferentiated action melange that makes
minutes seem like hours. Unlike earlier
Carpenter spectacles like The Thing and They Live, which exploited a similar alien
possession gimmick, there's never a lick of suspense as to whether a given character has
been taken over by the Martian phantoms. The
director seems more interested in gory effects than keeping track of his story, which
really shouldn't have been too difficult given its bare-bones nature. But if Ghosts
of Mars is too elemental, it's also all too aware of its own camp value. This is the kind of movie where the sight of a
colleague's head impaled on a spike surrounded by insane miners slicing open their own
hands provokes a character to announce helpfully, "We've got a situation here!" Later, Henstridge ponders aloud: "What would
happen if we blew up the nuclear power station? I
mean, there'd be a big explosion, right?" Hmm...a
big explosion in a dumb, formulaic action picture? I
think you can count on it, ma'am.
If he'd been born a decade or two earlier, Carpenter would no doubt
have thrived in the 50's and 60's, churning out sci-fi/horror quickies for the drive-in
market. As it is he's made more than his
share of entertaining schlock over the years; everything from the seminal slasher flick Halloween to the
sweet-tempered E.T. knockoff Starman to the
grungy thriller Escape from New York. Even lesser efforts like They Live and In the Mouth of Madness
were crafted with enough conviction and quirky charm to qualify as guilty pleasures. Ghosts of
Mars gives us Carpenter on auto-pilot; despite its freak show villains and desperate
techno/metal score, it's a square and routine clunker that could have been made anytime in
the last twenty years.
Between this latest trio of Mars pictures and those other recent black
holes Battlefield: Earth and Planet of the Apes, the more conspiracy-minded
among us might begin to suspect a Hollywood plot to undermine the future of our space
program. Who knows, a few more of these interstellar turkeys and we may end up with an
entire generation of Americans who'll never want to set foot off the planet as long as
they live.
- Scott Von Doviak
