by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Escape from Mars — a
bit of a misnomer because the titular escape doesn’t actually happen until the
last few minutes — turned out to be even better, written by Jim Henshaw and
Peter Mohan and directed by Neill Fearnley. A 1999 production of Paramount
Television, it posited that humans would fly the world’s first successful Mars
mission in 2015 (in Special Journey
it was 2005!) and that in this vision of the future the private sector funded
the mission with the idea that they could turn a profit by mining the abundant
supply of diamonds and other precious jewels on Mars. (Even if those jewels
existed, flooding the market with a whole new supply of them from Mars would
significantly and precipitously drive down their price — a bit of elementary Economics 101 that seems to have
eluded Messrs. Henshaw and Mohan.) The complications on this one are a meteor
shower that virtually destroys their spacecraft, the Sagan (naming it after the celebrity scientist Carl Sagan
was a nice touch!), once it’s landed on Mars and they’re supposed to stay there
18 months and build a base of operations for a future colony, as well as some
bizarre romantic complications that threaten for a while to turn this movie
into Mars: The Soap Opera.
The
mission commander, John Rank (Peter Outerbridge), receives word just before the
blast-off that his wife Stephanie (Tammy Isbell) is divorcing him — though he
keeps that information from the private-sector bigwigs lest they decide he’s in
too much emotional turmoil to fly the spacecraft and replace him. His
second-in-command, Liz Poirer (Christine Elise), gets a last-minute sexual
experience from her hot boyfriend back home whom she plans to marry after her
return — only, in a nicely ironic touch, she makes it back but he doesn’t: he gets killed in a traffic accident on
Earth and she receives word of this on Mars. We get a “plant” of the main
intrigue when we’re told by one of the officials that Mars experiences meteor
showers just like Earth does, only because Mars’s atmosphere is so thin they
don’t burn up on entry and therefore they become lethal projectiles — and a
series of meteors take out some of the Earth colonists’ structures and damage
the Sagan so it’s touch-and-go
whether they’ll have a flyable spacecraft for their escape from Mars. With
better production values than Special Report and a more complete portrayal of the mission
(though, in order to use stock footage of space shuttle launches, the makers of
Escape from Mars made their ship
look exactly like the shuttle — promoting a lot of “Goofs” posters on imdb.com
who pointed out that the shuttle’s own rocket motors can only steer it into
Earth orbit and land it safely, not
take off from a planet and overcome its gravity), Escape from Mars is an even tougher project, more suspenseful and
more entertaining, and the finale (Commander Rank discovers both water and life
on Mars even though he gives up his life doing so — and, as an ironic result,
he facilitates the others’ escape now that they only have four people to fly
off the planet and provide life-support for, not five) is especially moving.
These are both films that deserve to be better known!
