Brian De Palma stages the space walk with the patience of a man who loves the machinery, and for twenty minutes the film is alive. The rest is a rescue told in press-release dialogue, with a last act whose answer is sillier than its question.
Brian De Palma’s Mission to Mars wants to be two films, a NASA procedural about a rescue and a hushed picture about where life came from, and it gets about half of each. The first is done with real care for how hatches seal and how people move in a suit. The second is done with a swelling choir and a script that explains itself at the end as if to a slow class. We admired several stretches of it and cannot recommend the whole, which is roughly where most critics landed in 2000 and where we land now.
It opens well. Stephen H. Burum’s camera follows the crew of the first manned Mars mission round a barbecue in a single long take, drifting from a beer cooler to a child on a swing to Jim McConnell (Gary Sinise) standing apart from it all, and by the time the shot ends we know who is going, who is staying and who has been left behind. The dialogue is not good even here, but the shot carries it. For a few minutes the film feels like De Palma’s.
The cast are good enough to survive what they are given. Sinise plays McConnell as a man who has stopped arguing with his grief and is simply carrying it, and he is the only person on screen whose sadness reads as real. Tim Robbins and Connie Nielsen, as the married Woody Blake and Terri Fisher, are relaxed and likeable, and their scenes together, including a slow weightless dance in the ship, are the warmest things in the film. Don Cheadle spends much of the running time alone and manages to look like a man who has been alone for a year. Jerry O’Connell is the joker, and is written as one.
The middle stretch, in orbit and on the approach to Mars, is the reason to watch. De Palma stages a hull breach and a space walk at a patient, almost stately pace, with Burum holding the wide shot so we can read distances and Paul Hirsch cutting only when something has changed. Blood leaves a wound and hangs in the cabin as a string of slow red beads, and the film treats this as something to look at rather than a shock. We sat forward and stopped noticing the dialogue for about twenty minutes. It is unhurried, physical film-making, and there is not much of it in space pictures.
Ennio Morricone scores all of this as if it were a mass. Low strings, then a choir, then a theme that keeps rising towards a resolution that never quite arrives. On the space walk it works, because the images are large enough to bear it. Over a briefing, or a man opening a packet of sweets, it is absurd, and there are a lot of briefings. Sanja Milkovic Hays’s suits and the ship interiors look borrowed from an actual space agency, and the film is at its best whenever it trusts that hardware to be interesting on its own.
It does not trust it for long. John Thomas, Jim Thomas and Graham Yost’s screenplay has people say what they are doing while they do it, then say what it means, then say it again for the person who has just arrived. Nobody in the film has a trait that is not also a plot function. The mystery on the surface is handled as a puzzle, and once the crew are at a table working it out with a bag of sweets, the dread has gone and it does not come back.
The last act goes somewhere we will not describe, except to say that the film answers its own question in full, slowly, with visual aids. We laughed at a moment plainly meant as wonder, and we did not enjoy laughing, because the people who made it were sincere. Against 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), which it borrows from openly, it makes the mistake Kubrick did not: it tells you.
De Palma made Mission: Impossible four years earlier, a film that also had a thin script and got by on set pieces and nerve. This one has the set pieces and none of the nerve. Watch it for the middle forty minutes, in the dark, and decide for yourself whether to stay for the choir. At 114 minutes, with a PG certificate, it is at least a Mars film you can show a ten-year-old, who may take the ending better than we did.
