Last night’s Mars movie screening (http://marsmovieguide.com/) featured two surprisingly good “sleepers,” both made-for-TV movies from the 1990’s that in whole or part took the conceit of being presented as live journalistic reports of (fictitious) missions to Mars (an interesting, if rather obvious, inversion of the gimmick of Orson Welles’ famous 1938 broadcast of H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds, which presented Wells’ story of a Martian invasion of Earth as if it were being reported by radio newscasters in real time). The first one, Special Report: Journey to Mars (1996), used the fake “newscast” gimmick throughout and was presented as a production of the “General News Network” (GNN), which was covering the first humanned mission to Mars in a craft called the Destiny that looked like a giant bathtub stopper in space.
Written by Rasha Drachkovich (story) and Augustus Taylor (teleplay), and directed by Robert Mandel, Special Report: Journey to Mars alternated between several locations: the White House (U.S. President Elizabeth Richardson, played by Elizabeth Wilson, was elected in 2000 and has staked so much of the prestige of her administration on the success of the Destiny, which has been launched by the U.S. as part of a consortium with 17 other countries, that she’s expected to resign if the mission fails), NASA’s ground control, the spacecraft itself (one of the crew members, Ryan West [Judge Reinhold], is actually an embedded GNN reporter, though he speaks his dispatches from space sotto voce as if he’s afraid the other crew members will catch him talking to the media), a satellite GNN had orbited around Mars to catch shots of the spacecraft as it flies in, and the prison cell where anti-space travel activist Eric Altman (Richard Schiff) is being held after he and his fellow demonstrators were arrested following a hack of the GNN broadcast in which a mystery man with disguised voice claiming to be from Altman’s organization says that they have inserted malware into the spacecraft’s computer system that will prevent it from ever reaching Mars.
At first I thought this was going to be another example of a problem we’ve had a number of times with films shown at the Mars movie screenings — a great idea for a movie sabotaged by cheap production values and a budget too low to realize the filmmakers’ visions — but despite the visual tackiness and the rather amateurish acting (even though some actors with estimable reputations, like Reinhold, Keith Carradine as mission commander Eugene Slader, and Alfre Woodard as GNN anchor Tamara O’Neil, are in the cast), Special Report: Journey to Mars gains in power and force as the story progresses and becomes genuinely suspenseful. It seems that unknown people have deliberately sabotaged the Mars mission, not only by sneaking malware into its computer systems but by infecting Captain Slader with nanobots, molecule-sized machines that are slowly disintegrating his body from inside — leaving it touch-and-go as to whether he’ll retain enough memory and knowledge to complete the mission or his second-in-command, Russian cosmonaut Lt. Tanya Sadovoy (Diane Venora, who played Charlie Parker’s common-law wife Chan Richardson in Clint Eastwood’s masterpiece Bird and who, like co-star Forest Whitaker, deserved more of a career boost from that movie than she got), will have to take over the “con” à la The Caine Mutiny.
Carradine’s performance as the man who’s all too aware of his predicament and
the danger it’s putting his crew in anticipates his excellent acting as the
President of the United States in the series Madam Secretary, particularly the episode in which he realized his
mind was deteriorating and he might have to pass the power of the presidency,
at least temporarily, to his vice-president. The script perfectly mocks the
conventions of newscasting (even though there are some awfully long portions of
dead air on the supposed GNN broadcast as the news staffers themselves are
shocked by the developments) and in particular the God-awful human-interest
profiles of the astronauts cut in at various points, reminiscent of those
horrible profiles of Olympic athletes that clutter up the Olympic telecasts.
The writers and director Mandel ramp up the suspense as it turns out the
saboteurs are agents of an international corporate combine who lost the
contract to build the Mars spacecraft to one of its competitors and decided to
seek revenge by making common cause with Right-wing nationalist political
parties in Europe to sabotage the spacecraft, ensure the mission’s failure, and
bring down the Richardson administration in favor of a nationalist regime in
the U.S. There’s even a character in a red baseball cap, though he’s supposed
to be the head of NASA and therefore one of the good guys, Scott Berlin (Dean
Jones, veteran of a ton of silly Disney movies in the early 1960’s, including
one I have memories of — like a disease — called Moon Pilot, in which he played an astronaut seduced away from
his moon mission by a female alien who hijacks his spacecraft and takes it to
her home planet, which has seven
moons), who for some reason gets drenched with a bucket of water when the Destiny successfully lands on the moon (though I still
couldn’t resist the obvious talk-back joke when he appeared in a red ballcap:
“Make NASA Great Again”).
It turns out the malware on the computer was brought
on board, inadvertently, by the GNN reporter, who accepted a piece of hardware
made by the company that was trying to sabotage the mission; two of the
astronauts, an American man and a British woman who’ve fallen in love with each
other aboard the spacecraft, do a spacewalk to open the radar control manually
because the malware has made it impossible for the computer to open it or land
the ship; Lt. Sadovoy lands it herself after Slader has finally become too sick
to do so; the countries of the world cheer the accomplishment (represented, of
course, by stock footage of various countries’ real-life celebrations of other
things); and we’re told that the miscreants who tried to sabotage the mission
are being arrested. Special Report: Journey to Mars turned out to be a quite effective suspense piece
that’s been held in cinematic limbo since its initial airing, which apparently
had the second-lowest ratings of any TV-movie ever — a fate this surprisingly
good film didn’t deserve despite the budget restrictions and the bits of
tackiness that intruded because of the money the filmmakers had (or didn’t
have) to spend.
