by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
After Red Faction:
Origins was over, I described it to Charles
as “a Nietzschean movie — beyond good and bad.” That about sums it up. The big
gimmick is that Mars was colonized by Earth, only the Earthlings who came to
Mars started rebelling and therefore the planet was taken over by something
called the Earth Defense Force ( EDF), which ran the place in such a
high-handed, arbitrary and ruthlessly cruel fashion Saddam Hussein’s Iraq
looked like a summer camp by comparison. Earthling leader Alec Mason (Robert
Patrick, older and considerably heavier than he was in the early 2000’s as the
second Terminator) led a revolution against EDF in coalition with the
native-born Martians (who look the same as humans) under the leadership of “The
Matriarch” (Kate Vernon), who keeps appearing as a hologram à la the first Star Wars (a reference not lost on our science
fiction-knowledgeable audience!) and isn’t seen as a fully live character until
the final scene. Alas, once they defeated the EDF the Earth colonists and the
native Martians started a war against each other, while remnants of the EDF
escaped and formed their own redoubt in the Martian underground. There they
trained a race of storm troopers who look like a low-rent version of the ones in
Star Wars (they’re dressed in
all-white uniforms, but made of cloth instead of plastic) and attacked Alec
Mason, kidnapping his son Jake (Samuel Davies) and daughter Lyra (Isabelle
Blake-Thomas).
Jake eventually escaped and became the leader of the Red Faction,
descendants of the colonists from Earth who fight both the White Faction (as
the surviving EDF’ers are known, no doubt a deliberate parallel to the
1917-1921 Russian civil war that followed the Revolution, in which the
Bolshevik forces were known as the Red Army and the counter-revolutionaries who
wanted to restore the Tsar were the White Army) and the native Martians. Lyra,
however, has gone all Stockholm on us, joining the White Faction, allying
herself with it and even falling in love with a White Faction leader, Adam Hale
(Gareth David-Lloyd). As befits a movie which originated as a video game and
was essentially a prequel to it, Red Faction has virtually no plot development at all — it’s
basically an updated Republic serial, a series of action highlights with long,
ponderous exposition sequences between them — and it unfolded before me without
giving me much of any emotional response at all, either good or bad. It didn’t
help that the female lead, Tess de la Vega (Danielle Nicolet), was drawn as the
typical stupid ninny of an old-fashioned action-adventure film, supposedly
there as a love interest in the final reel but doing little or nothing to help
him and just annoying him and getting in the way — 44 years after Carrie Fisher
liberated the sci-fi heroine by picking up a Blaster in the first Star
Wars and firing away at the baddies along
with the male good guys, there’s no excuse for this sort of woman character
anymore!
Even the final sequence — Alec Cross, who descended into an alcoholic
torpor following the kidnapping of his kids, redeems himself by flying a
suicide mission to destroy the “Dreadnought,” the gigantic EDF craft which will
attack both the Red Faction and the indigenous Martians to get them to go to
war with and destroy each other, thereby leaving the planet safe for the
EDF’ers to take over — which was supposed to be moving, fell more or less flat because we’ve seen this far too
many times in far too many better movies. It also doesn’t help that director
Michael Nankin and writers Danny Bilson, Paul De Meo and Andrew Kreisberg cop
from all too many older and far better movies — not only the first Star
Wars but also 2001, three of whose most famous scenes get quoted in just
the first reel of Red Faction: Origins!
