Mission to Mars (2000)

It's ugly, lifeless, and boring. Elon will love it.

Mission to Mars (2000)
Directed by Brian De Palma
Written by Lowell Cannon, Jim Thomas, John Thomas (Story) Jim Thomas & John Thomas, Graham Yost (Screenplay)

“Mission to Mars” was a fairly dull ride at Disneyland, consisting mostly of canned narration, vibrating seats, and the sight of adolescent riders shifting their mouse-ear hats to their laps in an effort to conceal the resulting erections. The motion picture Mission to Mars offers largely the same experience, except without the engorged tissues.

It’s the year 2020, and Man is still alive, and Woman has apparently survived. It’s the night before the first of two staggered flights to Mars are about to blast off, and judging by the beer-swilling barbecue that’s in progress, NASA has recruited its astronauts from some of the finest trailer parks in America. Don Cheadle with be leading the first mission, Tim Robbins will be leading the second, while veteran astronaut Gary Sinise will be doing pretty much what he did in Apollo 13—staying on Earth and sulking.

One year later. Don and crew think they’ve found water on Mars, but in a startling twist, it turns out they’ve actually discovered some unconvincing special effects. And whatever force is generating the CGI can apparently read the astronauts’ minds, because it assumes the form of the one thing that most terrifies trailer park denizens: a tornado.

Cut back to Earth, where we finally get a glimpse at all the cool stuff we have to look forward to. According to the visionary filmmakers, in 2020 we’ll have a giant wheel-shaped space station, like we were supposed to have back in 2001, our hot-shot pilots will drive T-birds like they did in the 1950s, and our space program will be run by an elderly Nazi, just like it was in the 1960s.

Okay, the visionary thing isn’t working out, so how about some plot? Mission Control receives a faint transmission from Mars. It seems that Don somehow survived the twister, but he’s bruised and traumatized, his spacesuit is spattered with the blood of his dead comrades, and a witch is trying to steal his ruby slippers.

Gary demands that project director Armin Mueller-Stahl authorize a rescue mission to Mars. Armin is reluctant, observing that any rescue attempt would be expensive, dangerous, and ultimately pointless, since all Don has to do is click his heels together three times. Then Tim Robbins demands that Armin assign Gary to Tim’s flight, even though Gary’s wife died, and his personal tragedy is causing friction with the other crewmembers, who demand their own lachrymose back-story. Finally, the British demand that Armin stop talking in that heavy German accent, because it’s giving them all flashbacks to the Blitz.

Tim and his wife Terry are off to Mars, with Gary and Jerry O’Connell, who eventually get bored with the entertainment potential of their rhyming names, and pass the time by creating a free-floating double helix out of M&Ms. “That is the exact genetic composition of my ideal woman,” Jerry says. This news arouses Gary, who eats two M&Ms from the middle of the ideal woman, in the cinema’s first example of molecular porn.

The gods apparently take offense at this idiotic scene, and pelt the ship with meteorites. The imperiled astronauts heroically attempt to repair their ship, in a taut action set piece that packs in all the drama and excitement of watching your older brother replace the water pump in his AMC Gremlin.

Our heroes fumble the repairs and blow up the ship, which doesn’t speak terribly well for NASA, since your brother managed to properly install the water pump even though he was listening to Gentle Giant at the time and totally baked on half a bag of Maui Wowie.

Tim leads his crew on a desperate space-walk to an orbiting supply satellite, but then he slips, falls into the atmosphere, and burns up. Then Gary, Terry, and Jerry crash the satellite into Mars, bringing to a climax the most inept rescue attempt since that episode of Gilligan’s Island where the Professor programmed a robot to walk to Hawaii.

Don, after expressing disappointment that NASA sent a bunch of self-immolating goons to his rescue, introduces them to his neighbor, The Giant Face of Mars. Intrigued, Gary turns the radar gun on the Giant Face to check its fastball, and discovers that the beams act like a good mud mask; it causes the Face’s pores to open wide enough for the astronauts to walk inside, where a planetarium show is in progress.

A tall, thin, flame-shaped alien appears, revealing to the awe-struck humans that Mars was once populated by a race of Goya etchings. It seems that a billion years ago, Mars was like Earth, until it was struck by an asteroid that turned the planet into an icy wasteland. So the technologically advanced inhabitants boarded spaceships and rocketed toward a distant galaxy in search of a new, Earth-like home, although it seems like it would have been a lot quicker just to go to Earth. Maybe they were afraid they’d look like out-of-towners, and the native trilobites would pester them to buy baskets and folk art, and the cab drivers would take them to clip joints. Anyway, far be it from us to question the wisdom of god-like aliens shaped like those twisty orange bulbs you see in the wrought iron chandeliers of Mexican restaurants.

One alien stayed behind, however, to seed the Earth with Martian DNA, resulting in the evolution of everything from amoebas to Ann Coulter (apparently they were keeping the good stuff for themselves). The astronauts are so moved by this news that they join hands with the Martian around a holographic image of Earth, and sing a selection of camp songs. It’s an inspiring moment of interspecies understanding, although one gets the impression that the Martian is just mouthing the words to “Kumbaya.”

Don, Terry and Jerry prepare to blast off in Don’s repaired rocket. But Gary realizes that the Giant Face of Mars is not only a planetarium and a source of National Enquirer cover stories, it’s also a space ship, and he decides to ride it to wherever the ancient Martians went. So he enters the Martian command module, which locks him in and rapidly fills with water. And as Gary drowns, the entire movie flashes before his eyes, including scenes that happened just thirty seconds ago, so we get to enjoy it all over again, except this time with a sappy fanfare blaring at us. Terry and Jerry lift off for Earth (where they will presumably resign from NASA and pursue careers as an animated cat and mouse team), while the Martian spaceship rockets away toward that distant galaxy, carrying Gary’s bloated, drowned body to a rendezvous with our alien ancestors, in what must be the most elaborate payoff to a practical joke in history.

Housekeeping Note: Ever feel like patting the writer on the head, but already subscribe to seven hundred other things? Me too. So I’ve added a Tip Jar below, if you happen to feel like bunging in a few bucks to say “Atta Boy!”