by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s films at the Mars movie screening, http://marsmovieguide.com/, were the
first three episodes of Mars, a 2016
mini-series produced by Imagine Entertainment and Zak Productions for the
National Geographic cable channel and an uneasy mix of documentary and
dramatized story. The documentary scenes took place in 2016 and featured
then-President Barack Obama, SpaceX and Tesla founder and CEO Elon Musk (one of
the most repulsive presences in contemporary capitalism — a lot of my fellow
sci-fi buffs are counting on him to build and finance a real-life Mars rocket
and other big space projects, but personally I can’t wait to see him fall on
his ass and his businesses go crashing down in flames like some of his test
rockets), astronauts Scott and Mark Kelly (Scott did a tour of duty in the
International Space Station for a year to test how the human body would react
to being weightless for so long a time — let’s face it, we evolved in a world
with a certain level of gravity and that’s how our bodies are designed to work,
and apparently the body itself, and in particular the organs within it, atrophy
when they have to function for a long period of time without that good ol’
gravity we’re used to) and other talking heads discussing both the challenges
of a manned (or personned — this show is actually progressive in positing that
half the crew members on the first human mission to Mars would be women) flight
to Mars, as well as establishing a colony there, and the degree to which Mars
itself is so inherently inhospitable an environment for humans that the people
would continually be fighting the planet to survive. The show cuts from the
documentary segments shot in and depicting 2016 to 2033, when the Daedalus, the first human mission to Mars, is ready to
launch. The flight is being sponsored by a Vienna-based consortium called the
International Mars Scientific Foundation (IMSF), though the prime mover and
principal funder is a multi-billionaire pretty obviously patterned on Elon Musk
who stands to lose his entire fortune if the mission fails. (Not long ago I
read a quite interesting PBS program on the Mayflower pilgrims and noted that their mission to the U.S.,
as well as quite a lot of the other early colonizations of the New World, were
funded by private entities hoping they’d make money from them, so the idea that
the private sector will step in where governments fear to tread and bankroll
space exploration in exchange for mineral rights or whatever actually has
historical precedent.)
He keeps pressuring the reluctant fellow IMSF board
members to keep the mission going and allow it to land on Mars instead of
aborting when it ends up 75 kilometers from its destination, just far enough
away that all the previously landed life-support systems are out of reach and
the astronauts have to make a hazardous cross-planet crossing to get to something they can shelter themselves in and live relatively
normally. The three episodes we saw — the first in the series; there were at
least seven episodes in season one and, after a one-year hiatus, the series is
scheduled to resume for a second season this fall — were written by the usual
committees (Ben Young Mason and Justin Wilkes are designated as series
creators, and the actual writing credits are to Karen Janszen and Paul Solet
for episode one, “Novo Mundo”; André Bormanis and Paul Solet for episode two,
“Grounded”; and Mickey Fisher and Paul Solet for episode three, “Pressure
Drop”) and depict a crew nicely assorted in terms of gender, race and
nationality, though the mission commander is an American, Ben Sawyer (Ben
Cotton), and he’s the typical stiff-upper-lip Anglo hero type. The other crew members
include Hana Seung (played by a woman billed only as “Jihae” who also plays her
twin sister Joon, who’s part of the crew at Mission Control), Javier Delgado
(Alberto Ammann), Amélie Durand (Clémentine Poldatz), Marta Kamen (Anamaria
Marinca) and the most butch one of the bunch, Robert Foucault (Sammi Rotibi),
who despite his French-sounding name is actually Black (I guess we were
supposed to think he was a descendant of immigrants from one of France’s former
African colonies) but is stuck with an underwritten role that gives him almost
nothing to do. I give this show credit for a bit of creative plotting — Ben
Sawyer is actually killed off at the end of episode two (which would have been
like offing William Shatner midway through the first season of the original Star
Trek), since he went on the Mars mission
without disclosing to anyone that he had a heart condition that would have
disqualified him in case anyone had known about it, and his heart finally burst
on the long trek to the Mars base (something some members of the audience
faulted the film about, since the walk was as excruciating as it would be under
Earth’s gravity and the filmmakers ignored that Martian gravity is just a bit
over half of ours — but perhaps we were supposed to believe that the crew was
still adjusting to having gravity at all after eight months of weightlessness in space). We get a lot of
hard-core medical porn, including scalpels cutting into his bodies and letting
out rivers of blood, before he finally expires at the end of episode two.
As he
dies he lets go of a piece of red rock which, as a child, he picked up in the
Arizona desert in 2005 when his dad took him camping there and they built a
scale model of the solar system (the flashbacks showing this are integrated far
less well than the documentary sequences by Everardo Gout, who directed all
three episodes — “Ah, it’s directed by a disease!” I’d probably have joked if
it had just been Charles and I watching this at home), and of course as the
rock fell from his hand I couldn’t help but intone, “Ro-o-o-osebud.” Earlier we’d got a dream sequence shot in Monument
Valley, Utah (though most of the “Mars” scenes were actually shot in Morocco)
which represented Ben Sawyer’s hallucinations as he died — one member of the
audience remarked that he seemed to be on drugs and I pointed out that since an
earlier bit of dialogue had specified that in order to go through the operation
he’d been given Fentanyl, a very
heavy-duty pharmaceutical opiate, as an anesthetic he literally was on drugs. Aside from the nice and unexpected touch
of killing off the Anglo-American hero lead at the end of episode two and
having Asian woman Hana Seung take over as mission commander, the dramatic
portions of this series were pretty stock and had the disadvantage of having way too many built-in cliffhangers, not only between the
episodes but where the commercial breaks fell on the original telecast. (The
breaking points were more obvious than usual because at each one a title with
the word “MARS” stretching across the screen came up.) I was sporadically
impressed by Mars but some of it
was a long, hard slog — and the rather doleful music by Nick Cave and his
writing partner Warren Ellis didn’t help much: at the end of episode three,
“Pressure Drop,” the crew finally
finds the “lava tube” inside Mars, left by the eruption of a long-extinct
volcano and containing enough ice they can thaw it and have a supply of
drinking water, the filmmakers put on Bob Dylan’s record “Shelter from the
Storm” and you had the rare experience of finding a Dylan song an upper in this sort of context! Mars was competently acted and decently directed, but the
overall impression I got was of an uneasy mixture of documentary and docudrama
that I wanted to like better than
I did.
