Mission to Mars: Movie Review (2000)

Directed by Brian De Palma, written by Jim Thomas, John Thomas, Graham Yost and Lowell Cannon, 113 minutes, rated PG.

(Editor's Note: From the archives.)

Just imagine all the bickering that could have been heard around the world had audiences been allowed to sit in the back seat of Brian De Palma’s ill-fated “Mission to Mars”:

“Look out for that cliche!”

“There’s no intelligent life out here!”

“Blast you, De Palma! You’ll never have the right stuff!”

De Palma’s film is so horrifically sentimentalized, so false and cloying on so many false and cloying levels, audiences at my screening last March were emptying their bags of popcorn to provide room for something a bit more vile.

Earth to De Palma--your mission stinks.

Right away his film shoots into a black hole of stupidity with a neighborhood block party for the swaggering bunch of meatheads NASA is rocketing to Mars. God help us all if these fools are the pick of NASA’s litter.

It’s the year 2020 and the bad news here is that man still hasn’t evolved out of gross fits of sentimentality. To wit: Before these men leave for their visit with the little green men, they have a bonding moment under the stars in which they embrace each other fiercely and slap each other’s rear ends while puffing away on long, thick cigars. (Armchair psychologists can make of this what they wish.)

De Palma has a good cast in Tim Robbins, Gary Sinise, Connie Nielson, Don Cheadle and Jerry O’Connell, but it’s a crime what he does to them. Namely, he asks them to speak. “The universe is not chaos,” one character says with heartfelt conviction. “It’s connection! Life reaches out to life!” How about reaching out and slapping your agent?

Once on Mars, the special effects do get nifty, but who cares about nifty special effects when you can’t connect with the characters? Nobody here is real -- the characters are dishrags moving about on the screen. Worse, De Palma has ripped off so many films -- especially “2001: A Space Odyssey,” “Contact,” “E.T.” and “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” -- that his own film takes no shape.

It’s true. “Mission to Mars” is as gaseous as a forming star, but it’s never once as spectacular.

Grade: D-