The House Next Door's 02/18/06 interview with former Salon critic Charles Taylor inspired some of the most heated reactions of any article yet published here. A number of comments centered on Taylor's defense of Brian De Palma's "Mission to Mars," a sci-fi epic that has proved surprisingly divisive for such a gentle movie. To build on that discussion, I've culled a representative selection of reviews, arranged in a spectrum from pans to raves.
Andrew O’Hehir, Salon: “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.”
Wesley Morris, The San Francisco Examiner: “The film is filled with people so pulseless that when the David Lee Roth-era Van Halen comes on in the form of ‘Dance the Night Away,’ they do gravity-less ballet. It's an experience as frustrating as watching Jeff Gordon drive a stock car through a bowl of oatmeal. But that's our crew, folks: a band of pansies who've chosen the lamest tune in the Van Halen catalogue to party.”
Elvis Mitchell, The New York Times: “He has been accused of being inexpressive, but his problem here is that he is too enraptured by his subject. There's a follow-your-bliss dreaminess here that wouldn't be out of place at a Deepak Chopra seminar or on a Mannheim Steamroller album.”
Roger Ebert, The Chicago Sun-Times: “The three key sequences are very well done. They are surrounded by sequences that are not--left adrift in lackluster dialogue and broad, easy character strokes. Why does the film amble so casually between its high points? Why is a meditative tone evoked when we have been given only perfunctory inspiration for it? Why is a crisis like the breached hull treated so deliberately, as if the characters are trying to slow down their actions to use up all the available time? And why, oh why, in a film where the special effects are sometimes awesome, are we given an alien being who looks like a refugee from a video game?”
David Edelstein, Slate: “The prospect of De Palma—the spatial-temporal wizard of modern suspense—on Mars made me feel like a 6-year-old waiting for the latest chapter of ‘Flash Gordon.’ But ‘Mission to Mars’ isn't popcorn sci-fi. It's square, stately, technobabble sci-fi with religioso undertones, and the closer it gets to its climactic revelation, the cornier and more Spielbergian it gets.”
J. Hoberman, The Village Voice: “’Mission to Mars’ is a movie to warm John McCain's heart—a rescue saga full of a touchy-feely esprit that's predicated on equal parts Buck Rogers bravado and backyard barbecue, the whole burnt burger drenched in Ennio Morricone's elegiac western-style score. Despite one unmistakable De Palma gag—a visual joke evoking the Challenger explosion—the project is scarcely more personal than ‘Mission Impossible.’”
David Sterritt, Christian Science Monitor: “Movie fans think of many things when Brian De Palma's name is mentioned: violent thrills, over-the-top style, Hitchcockian suspense. What doesn't come to mind are streamlined science fiction and New Age clichés - yet Mission to Mars has plenty of both, filling the screen with equal measures of eye-dazzling grandeur and mind-numbing sentimentality.”
Margaret A McGurk, The Cincinnati Enquirer: “Things go wrong with the rescue as well, requiring some clever problem-solving that provides the movie’s most suspenseful moments and seamless special effects…Unfortunately, the filmmakers’ imagination flags in the closing sequences; the movie’s final reel looks like a high-tech museum exhibit entitled ‘2001: A Space Odyssey for Dummies.’”
Matt Zoller Seitz, NYPress: “I’m not claiming ‘Mission to Mars’ is a masterpiece. Parts of it are just plain bad. …Still, seeing this movie clarified De Palma’s artistry for me, in ways I never could have anticipated…His films are dioramas, train sets, marionette shows, ant farms. This director likes his characters flat and abstract, but when the story and themes awaken his visual genius and sense of play, they come alive anyway. The limited characters in this film bloom because the story has made De Palma come alive. He’s in love with gadgets, in love with filmmaking and in love with love; when he looked at the rough cut, I bet even he was surprised by his own capacity for feeling.”
Ray Greene, Reel.com: “De Palma's “Mars”work demonstrates an increasingly rare Spielbergian ability to create memorable sequences from a rhythmic blending of carefully composed images, precise camera choreography, and the knowing application of the editor's knife.”
Ray Sawhill, Salon: “The film begins with a visual joke -- a rocket blastoff that turns out to be a toy rocket. By the final blastoff, real lives are at stake. De Palma is talking about the way we seem to be moving from an industrial culture that demands certitude and explanation to an information culture, where everything is a matter of probability and we try to comprehend the world by making models of it. Kubrick, our only other truly intellectual feature-filmmaker, got the respect for his brains (even for ‘Eyes Wide Shut’!) that De Palma has never gotten -- perhaps because the later Kubrick always maintained a magisterial, Euro-serious manner. De Palma is more American and boyish; he at least tries to deliver the pop goods.”
Giuseppe Puccio, Brian De Palma’s Split World: “A work of great purity and beauty, rigorous and touching. Even if some of the usual features of De Palma's cinema here are lacking, or anyway are greatly transformed, it is not difficult to recognize this movie as a very personal and sincere one, a film which, beyond any intellectual judgment or aesthetic admiration, deserves first of all to be loved.”
Charles Taylor, Salon: “Concerned with the wonders and limits of technology, and how we can use it without sacrificing our humanity, De Palma is addressing one of the key concerns of filmmaking, especially in an era when special effects threaten to supplant humanity in our movies.”
Armond White, NYPress: "'Amused contempt,' is the way Salon magazine praised the critical attack on ‘Mission to Mars.’ It’s a point of view that disdains emotionalism and beauty in cinema, aloof from art but reveling in smug superiority to any humane feeling that a filmmaker might express. Critics lining up to bitch-slap De Palma is the real bonfire of the vanities, a culmination of the pulp-trash culture that began by catering to adolescent cynicism, young adult hipsterism. Behind this is the dullest literal-mindedness. The issues-vs.-artistry complaint that Andrew Sarris outlined more than 30 years ago still threatens to keep movies a low medium, denying their esthetic (visual, kinetic, emotional) essence.”
Monday, February 20, 2006
Seeing red
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It wasn't until about three years after I'd seen this film, on opening night, that I'd realized that there was so much hate for it. I came away thinking that night that it was a noble but flawed attempt at a good science fiction movie. I liked how the spaceship actually had a centrifuge, and that the film attempted to have some scientific plausibility. But I did feel like it was ultimately too full of cliches--science fiction had been over these parts before, if not only in film, in literature especially.
Still, I might see this again sometime soon.
Yeah, well, like one of the 02/18/06 comments suggested, here we are five years later still arguing about this movie. Film critic Michael Koresky of Reverse Shot once said that when a work prompts drastically divided reactions upon first release, history ultimately sides with the disputed work. I am not sure that's true in every case, or even in most cases, but it's definitely something to keep in mind.
I'm not sure that history always sides with the disputed work. It's over 30 years later and a lot of people can legitimately dispute the merits of such films as "A Clockwork Orange" and "Straw Dogs" without the anvil of history landing on their heads. Some movies do start to seem like masterworks after time passes, but others remain problematic.
And anyway, who cares what history might or might not say? We have to make our choice in the now.
I think of all the quotes on the front page, Roger Ebert's is the one that best sums up what I feel about this movie.
Ironically, Charles Taylor's remarks are most revealing to me about why the movie fails: the movie he describes in his review is an idealized blueprint, but it's not the movie actually up on the screen. He says it's a movie about technology and humanity, and each of these are themes presented in the movie, but not actually developed, and they pay off with one of the most excruciating final ten minutes of any movie I've seen in the last 6 years.
I can accept and enjoy the entire movie up to its allegedly transcendent finale; I would like to challenge anyone out there to defend this section in any possible way.
Jeff writes, "I can accept and enjoy the entire movie up to its allegedly transcendent finale; I would like to challenge anyone out there to defend this section in any possible way."
I'm not the guy to do that, as the ending is where it really lost me, too; as I said in my full review, I thought it was a mistake in "MTM" and in all movies for that matter to attempt to visualize what is essentially a meeting with the creator (or some force that's godlike from our puny human perspective) in concrete terms (particularly if the computer animation sucks).
The only movie that got anywhere near visualizing the inconceivable was "2001," and that was only because it worked around the edges of the unknowable and was smart enough not to rush at it head on. Taylor indicated in his 1/18/06 remarks on the comments page that it was a mistake to read the movie literally, and I think the ending works if you approach it that way, i.e. as a fairy tale or fable, but that's not sufficient for me, because De Palma set up the rest of the movie in an expressionist, romantic version of reality.
So Jeff's challenge stands. Anybody want to defend the ending of "Mission to Mars"?
I've never forgotten walking out of this movie at a sneak preview, absolutely dazzled, and running into a group of screenwriting students who picked it apart like seagulls on an overturned crab. When I tried to engage them about some visual component of the movie, they looked at me with total incomprehension...pretty much the same reaction I got two years later whenever I told people Femme Fatale was the year's best movie.
I stand by what some idiot wrote about Mission to Mars at the time of release: "De Palma has made a much more interesting and engaging movie from this material than he’ll ever get credit for. He tempers the script’s jingoism with a string of subversive sight gags that suggest the future is ruled by brand names, not government: The Stars and Stripes may fly on Mars, but so does the Pennzoil logo. Yet all human resources are properly dwarfed by the enormity of space and the desolate Martian landscape. With his cinematographer, Stephen H. Burum, De Palma plays tricks with our sense of scale from the ingenious first shot, which reveals a massive rocketship as a toy. That’s indicative of the way he regards our size—and status—in the universe.
"In one dazzling set piece, he confounds the viewer’s sense of perspective by rotating the camera from one Escher-esque level to the next aboard a revolving space station. In a sense, outer space is the ideal De Palma world: There’s no such thing as right side up."
Oh, hell I'll defend the ending which, I think, gives people trouble because it's De Palma providing a happy ending. (In the same way that people insist on misreading the end of "Schindler's List" as happy and talk about the sunshine when the real Schindlerjuden appear as being optimistic. No one making that argument remembers the *actual* last image of the movie: the shots of Jewish gravestones used as pavement that appear under the end credits.)
As I've said, the movie is about the question - Does technology facilitate or impede contact between living beings? In most of the movie, it impedes. Sinise watches film of his dead wife but it's a poor substitue for her living self; Tim Robbins' team watches a videotaped message from Cheadle's team that, because of a tape delay, they see at the exact moment that Cheadle's team is being decimated (this is a demonstration of the question of Godard's "Two or Three Things I Know About Her": how well can film be said to capture a reality that is always changing?); and Connie Neilsen watches her husband drift away in space and die even though their communication system allows his voice to appear as if he's next to her.
So, in the end of the film, Sinise, the latest of De Palma's whiz-kid adventurers, arrives at the place he has dreamed of since boyhood: He's in outer space, face to face with extraterrestrial life. What's brought him here? Technology.
But it brings him so far. His choice, depends on the contact that technology finally *can't* make. "Life reaches out to life," goes one line in the movie. (A digression: The complaints about the dialogue strike me as being tin-eared. The astronauts talk in the sort of middle-class, boosterish way that they've gotten used to. They're suburban guys. And I don't hear what they say as appreciably different from what the *real* astronauts can be heard saying in "For All Mankind," the compendium of the film shot on the Apollo missions. The words may be banal -- people's words often are. What's not banal is the feeling straining to make it's way out through those words.) You can find that line sappy, but the feeling with which it's expressed here is not. In fact, it seems to me that getting hung up on how the alien looks, etc., is capitulation to the very technological limits the film wants to define and move beyond. It's a bit like the folks who believe that great acting consists of the ability to do a convincing accent.
Charley: You write, "You can find that line sappy, but the feeling with which it's expressed here is not. In fact, it seems to me that getting hung up on how the alien looks, etc., is capitulation to the very technological limits the film wants to define and move beyond. It's a bit like the folks who believe that great acting consists of the ability to do a convincing accent." My problem with the alien isn't that it's not convincingly "real" -- though given De Palma's technological fetishist's concern with accuracy elsewhere in the film, that is a major failing any way you slice it -- it's that it's not envisioned with enough imagination, enough knock-you-on-your-ass beauty, to justify that buildup. Spielberg's aliens at the end of "Close Encounters" were probably the second best attempt to visualize the unimaginable in a sci fi film, after the finale of "2001," but Spielberg was much smarter about it than De Palma. Perhaps thinking long-term, and trying to visualize how the movie would be perceived 10 or 20 or 50 years later, he hid the aliens in bright light, Spielberg's equivalent of shadow. This was a slightly more literal presentation of humanity meeting another life form than Dave Bowman's evolutionary journey in "2001," but only slightly.
To summarize: I grok what De Palma is trying to do, I appreciate his sincerity and I don't think sentimentality (or any other kind of emotional display) is uncharacteristic for him (remember the scenes with Ness' family in "The Untouchables," and pretty much all of "Casualties of War"?) But I think in "Mission to Mars" he went about it in a way that was inconsistent with his strategy throughout the rest of the movie. The ending's failure is not one of vision but of strategy.
And to harp on this point further still, if De Palma had depicted the alien race with more mystery -- obscuring it in some way, or keeping it in shadow or light, or partly offscreen, thus denying us, as Spielberg and Kubrick denied us, the possiblity of judging it by literal standards, as a special effect -- I probably would have loved the ending. My feeling is, if you're gonna show me something amazing, it better be amazing. (Like H.R. Giger's aliens, which remain beautiful and terrifying even as they are seen more clearly with each passing "Alien" movie.) Or else it better be a joke, a cartoon sight gag. like the alients in Joe Dante's "Explorers." Anything in between is murder, and a director is better off shooting around the unknowable rather than film it head on and risk breaking the spell with something too prosaic, which is the creature at the end of "MTM" was.
Methinks CT is projecting generously here:
"What's not banal is the feeling straining to make it's way out through those words.) You can find that line sappy, but the feeling with which it's expressed here is not."
Many viewers, including me, experienced no such thing. Now, what to say about it? Is there such a thing as an objective feeling there, that we could definitively end the argument with proof? No there is not. There are actors and a director, and there is the subjective state of the viewer, willing or not to project meaning onto what he is watching.
My own willingness to make such allowances as Mr. Taylor has made was destroyed far earlier in the film, which struck me as supremely banal and ham-handed. Again, there is no objective proof of that assessment.
Nevertheless, I like science fiction a lot and I enjoyed MTM even though I thought it was crap.
Hell, I went to Virus, watched Donald Sutherland turned into a robot chasing Jamie Lee Curtis around a boat, and didn't regret it all that much.
What one misses in film criticism is an acknowledgement of the enormous SUBJECTIVITY of the experience.
When Matt first invited me to cruise this joint, there are many films that I expected and hoped to see debated here...MISSION TO MARS was not one of them.
I thought everybody knew DePalma was all downhill after "Phantom of the Paradise".
Sorry about that, Ruediger. Stick around, though. If this room of the House doesn't do it for you, there's always the next one.
PS -- What do you mean, it was all downhill after PHANTOM? That's a bold statement.
That WAS bold, wasn't it?
It was posted with tongue planted firmly in cheek, but now that I seriously consider the statement, I can honestly say that SISTERS & PHANTOM probably ARE my two DePalma faves.
Jessica Harper will always be a unique beast of beauty.
I saw PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE at the Inwood Theater in Dallas, Texas, when I was too young to know that I shouldn't be seeing something that mind-blowing. I was into classic horror films, the Boris Karloff-Bela Lugosi-Lon Chaney variety, and I thought this was going to be a straightforward retelling of the original PHANTOM movie, with rock music. Was I in for a surprise.
Okay, this settles it. I've got to see Mission To Mars for myself.
Excellent. That's always the endpoint of these discussions, isn't it?
No no no!
To respond to Mr. Taylor's comments: First of all, I don't think the movie is actually about what he says it's about, technology facilitating or impeding communications, because I don't think there's any impeding going on. Technology didn't kill his dead wife, it allows part of her to live on in audiovisual form. Technology doesn't prevent real-time communication between Mars and Earth, it's the vastness of space that provides the ironic disjunction between the recorded transmission and the Mars astronauts' deaths. Technology brings Robbins and Nielsen closer together as he dies, with the ability to speak intimately as if they're right next to each other even though they're not.
This is one of the major flaws of the movie: that it really doesn't have a strong thematic through-line. The emotional arc of the movie is provided by Sinise's sadness over his dead wife, which is unfortunately full of much New Age babble and a lot of banality. The movie begins with this plot line and the question of who's killing the Mars astronauts, goes into an hour-long digression on the trip to Mars, and then picks up again when they arrive.
I don't disagree about the visual splendors of much of the film, but man is it a frustrating movie.
Oh, anyway, Mr. Taylor really didn't manage to defend the ending as far as why it was necessary to show the bad-CGI alien that cries like a Navajo confronted with litter, or the space diorama about life on Mars, or the bad science that follows or any of the gobbeldygook that the poor actors had to react to on a greenscreen stage in the film's final section. The film's ending wants to be transcendent and falls flat on its face. This part of the movie is why people hate it if they do, not the preceding hundred-odd minutes of twirling visuals and Morricone.
Hey, Jeff--
I have a rather off the wall question for you.
You write, "Technology didn't kill his dead wife, it allows part of her to live on in audiovisual form. Technology doesn't prevent real-time communication between Mars and Earth, it's the vastness of space that provides the ironic disjunction between the recorded transmission and the Mars astronauts' deaths. Technology brings Robbins and Nielsen closer together as he dies, with the ability to speak intimately as if they're right next to each other even though they're not."
Could this not be the strong thematic through-line you say the movie lacks?
And following on that, is it even remotely possible that your allergic reaction to the movie is not due to the movie itself, but the intense pressure on the part of De Palma born-agains (Taylor, for instance) urging you to accept an interpretation that's at odds with your own, personal, valid interpretation of the movie?
I think Charley's interpretation of the film's view on technology is a valid one -- throughout "MTM" technology fails to save or protect the humans that created it. But your interpretation is also valid. I find both of them interesting and wonder if they cannot both be subsumed into one complex, contradictory master interpretation of the film's theme of man's relationship to technology. "2001" presents technology as enabling yet useless, at the same time. Why can't this movie attempt a similar type of complexity/contradiction, albiet in much more direct, emotional, even cartoony language?
Just asking.
PS -- I'm not defending the weepy "Antz" alien, so don't worry.
Sorry to keep beating this dead horse. Like I think I said, I don't think the film is bad, but horribly uneven. As far as your suggestion re: technology above, I would agree if I thought that the uses of communications technology actually were used thematically, but instead I think they're just devices, for exposition (in the case of Sinise's dead wife) or to enhance drama (Robbins and Connie Nielsen being able to speak before his death). If there's any theme in the middle portion of the movie it has more to do with the cold, inexorable equations governing space travel...but this is not a theme present in the movie's opening or closing acts.
You're right. The film could be better organized in certain respects. But at a silent film level, music plus images, I think it holds together. And isn't an important level? Perhaps the most important of all?
Think of it as De Palma's "Metropolis."
Oh Jesus, we're 23 posts and rolling on goddamn MISSION TO MARS... where the hell is Odie when I need him?
Establishing street-cred up front: I've always considered myself a drooling De Palma fanboy -- I even think MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE is kind of a masterpiece, and I do hope someday I'll be able to put into words why watching FEMME FATALE feels (at least to me, anyhow) like getting an amazing blow job.
But I was embarassed by MISSION TO MARS... quite literally, as I brought a date and won her over on the selection by insisting "it's De Palma - he always gets shitty reviews but the movies are always great."
She didn't talk to me the whole ride home.
Applying Matt's Friendship Theory Of Movies: Where was my buddy's wit? Where was that snarky, perverse knowingness that makes the movies such a naughty thrill? Failing all that, where were the ecstatic, distended set-pieces?
Sure, some of that gravity-free Steadicam stuff was alright - but all the crises seemed lacking in energy -- the dizzying disco dance floor sequences in CARLITO'S WAY had twice as much oomph.
And where were the sick punchlines? The left-field jolts?
The only time I felt like I was watching a De Palma movie was the opening reveal of the bottle rocket. The next two hours was mawkish, doofy and when the ANTZ-alien (good call, Matt) shed a tear I wanted to throw fruits and vegetables at the screen.
(On opening night, one of my friends left a drunk message on my answering machine, slurring: "The alien cries! The alien fucking cries!")
Maybe I just have a narrow conception of what to expect from this particular friend, but I don't think this kind of painfully earnest, pseudo-religiosity suits him at all. MISSION TO MARS didn't feel the slightest bit sincere to me, just sorta bland, sell-outy and hackish. (Didn't he take over the project fairly late in pre-production?)
I mean, at least the Jesus-Christ-pose baptism/rebirth in FEMME FATALE doubled as a full-on beaver shot. Now that's my De Palma!
Now this is where I'll defend the film, because I do think that the mid-movie set piece, from the asteroid storm that pierces the hull, until Tim Robbins' death, is pretty spectacular - as ecstatic and distended as you could ask for. But yeah, too much of the movie is solemn and I have a really hard time believing that even DePalma was taking it seriously while they were putting it together.
I don't even think the opening joke of the exploding rocket is all that great. I thought it was a toy rocket all along.
I am glad to see people standing up for "mission to mars". I have seen it probably 5 times, which is 4 times more than "phanton menace".
Once they get to mars its all good. The references to 2001 and the last 20 minutes of the film are great. I have to skip over the floating dance sequence though, its pure cheese and should have ended up on the cutting room floor in my opinion.
Mike Hill: would you be so kind as to expand on your above post and explain how the last 20 minutes are 'great'?
PS to Sean: I wish I could credit for the ANTZ line, but I was just repeating back something Jeff said.
I can't take credit for it either. I read it somewhere else, but where I have forgotten in the last six years.
Hey, Jeff -- Not to get your blood pressure bubbling again, but here's another defense of "Mission to Mars," in a Senses of Cinema interview with my colleague Armond White. By Jeremiah Kipp, yet!
Oh Jesus, we're 23 posts and rolling on goddamn MISSION TO MARS... where the hell is Odie when I need him?
I'm sorry, Sean. Odie was too busy incurring emergency hospital bills his insurance will probably not cover. Unfortunately for some, they didn't kill me. What they did do was far worse.
Nothing cinematically good has happened on Mars since the days of Marvin The Martian's regulator demodulator pistol. With that said, you know my take on Mission to Mars. And Total Recall too, though I am always quoting that movie in my Ah-nold imitations. "C'mon! Give dem back da eeehre!"
Jeff:
I like the last 20 mintues the most because the first time I saw the film, I was really taken by suprise at what they found inside the face (ship, whatever). I also liked the idea that that life was 'seeded' on Earth from an older species that had moved on. I am guessing this is not the first that this has was written (probably in a sci-fi book I have not read), but it is the first time I came across it.
I wrote this a few years ago. I'm about to Netflix M2M to see if it holds up or if it can be expanded:
Few films have been chewed up and spit out and rinsed down the drain as gleefully as Brian De Palma's Mission to Mars. I think people doing so have missed something crucial though. They spend so much time taunting De Palma for being a copycat that they forget that his referencing previous films often include referencing his own. I see Mission to Mars as a companion piece to Carrie, a retelling of that films pivotal scene.
In Carrie, Carrie and Tommy are at the prom and are having a great time dancing in ecstatic spirals -- amplified by De Palma's swirling camera. As frightening as the idea is for Carrie, she is in love. Tommy asks her how she is feeling and she replies, "I feel like I'm on Mars." Shortly after that, Carrie has those feelings doused in pigs blood. She is crushed at the moment of her lifes greatest pleasure. But why is she hurt really? She knows none of the kids in her school like her. She knows she doesn't belong at the prom much less being so honored at one. She is so hurt because she has taken the big risk and allowed herself to fall in love, a state where one is at her most vulnerable. And when one falls in love with another, the two biggest fears, the two things that would be the most devastating are being hurt by that person and losing that person. At that climactic moment, Carrie is hit over the head with both of these fears. Was Tommy a part of all this? Is he dead?
Move forward to Mission to Mars. Carries throwaway line about being in love feeling like being on Mars has been re-employed by De Palma and invested with a grand new meaning. It has become a symbol for love and all the ecstasies and terrors that go with it. Jim McConnell, the Gary Sinise character, has been hurt deeply by the death of his wife. He hasn't gotten over it. He no longer goes to Mars. His need in the film is to overcome this, to get over his fears and to go to Mars again. Or to state it literally instead of symbolically, he needs to allow himself to fall in love again.
In his article, A Nerds Rhapsody, Ray Sawhill discusses some of the symbols at play in the film: there's a real vision here an almost Tantric vision of women (the circle) and men (the column) attaining occasional bliss (the spiral) together Late in the film, McConnell is being prepared for a long journey. He steps into a lighted circle, is encased in a glass column (those circles! those columns!), and is submerged in a clear, roiling liquid Is he dying or in ecstasy? and [the scene] ends with a blastoff through a column of luminous swirling debris. If you note the fear on McConnell's face during this final scene until he gives in and allows the fluid to enter him and fill his lungs, it becomes clear that symbolically he is getting over his fear and is falling in love again. He is finally attaining that state of bliss again. He has fully returned to Mars and is ready for the first time since losing his wife to experience the ecstasy and to move beyond.
At the center of Mission to Mars is another couple, Woodrow Woody (Tim Robbins) and Terri (Connie Nielsen), already in a state of happily married bliss. They are literally at Mars. (Or is it figuratively? The literal and the symbolic are so close to the same in Mission to Mars.) They go through a reprise of the Carrie prom sequence. They dance in ecstatic spirals to Van Halens Dance the Night Away, a one time prom staple. Then, in my favorite and a truly harrowing scene, Terri is terribly hurt by the loss of her loved one. Woody, realizing he is too far away from the party on a space walk to return safely, and seeing that Terri is going to risk her life too in an attempt to save him, removes his helmet and perishes in the vacuum. Like Carrie and Tommy, loves two greatest fears have been realized for Terri and Woody (notice the echoes in the names). Terri is hurt by her husband and she loses her husband.
If one is inclined to only view the surface of Mission to Mars, one will understandably find it disappointing. But it is one of De Palma's richest, most poignant, and most haunting films if looked at more deeply. The opening barbecue sequence makes no sense if taken literally. No space program would expose its astronauts to such a germ factory on the eve of an expedition. But the sequence sets up all the themes of love and loss and fear that the film will be exploring and culminates in the child's sandbox scene. McConnell is looking at the play equipment and footprints in the sand and thinking about his wife and the life and kids he might have had with her. Cut to a footprint that we first perceive to be in the sand before realizing it is on the surface of Mars. What a great cinematic moment! It is a joining or connecting of the literal to the symbolic. The image that fills his remorse with swirls of joyful memories becomes an image of its symbol, Mars.
Chew on Mission to Mars all you want, but I suggest you consider swallowing at least a few of those bites from now on. I think Mission to Mars is a candidate for the most underrated film of all time.
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