Mission to Mars (2000)
Directed by Brian De Palma
When the first manned mission to Mars meets with a catastrophic and mysterious disaster after reporting an unidentified structure, a rescue mission is launched to investigate the tragedy and bring back any survivors.
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17 films that influenced Mission to Mars
What critics say influenced Mission to Mars
Typically, while a good screenplay only requires a single author, this unimaginative, derivative dreck required at least four, even with the massive cribbing from "2001: A Space Odyssey".
"2001: A Space Odyssey for dummies . .
Most obviously, "Mission to Mars" draws many of its details, large and small, from Stanley Kubrick's inscrutable "2001: A Space Odyssey," right down to the doughnut-shaped spacecraft and the astronauts' wraparound visors.
What isn't admirable is their choice to make this picture at all, which holds nothing in the way of inventiveness (it's all been seen before, in one way or the other, in such superior films as 1968's "2001: A Space Odyssey" and 1977's "Close Encounters of the Third Kind"), and everything in the way of corniness.
I won't even try to explain the movie's climax, a ridiculous sequence that begins with a rip-off of Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey and ends with an evolution lesson disguised as a computer-generated effect.
"Mission to Mars" is inspirational fantasy with more than a touch of "2001: A Space Odyssey" woven into its plot.
With Rocketship X-M, Kurt Neumann taught us a half-century ago that cinematic science fiction, when at a loss for better ideas, isn't afraid to hitch earthbound cosmological visions to a rhetoric of speechless wonder.
The inspiration (and I hesistate to use that word in any context associated with this movie) for Mission to Mars is apparently Close Encounters of the Third Kind, but there are also steals from Contact, Apollo 13, The Abyss, and even 1999's The Mummy.
What isn't admirable is their choice to make this picture at all, which holds nothing in the way of inventiveness (it's all been seen before, in one way or the other, in such superior films as 1968's "2001: A Space Odyssey" and 1977's "Close Encounters of the Third Kind"), and everything in the way of corniness.
We've seen the spaceship landing in Close Encounters of the Third Kind; we've seen the interplanetary lovefest of E.T. From sci-fi movies made by baby boomers who grew up reading Isaac Asimov and watching The Outer Limits, we know that all intelligent life in the universe wants to phone home.
(Robert Zemeckis went deeper in Contact; Stanley Kubrick went deepest in 2001: A Space Odyssey.)
The risk of a moribund film is only heightened by a couple of actors who look either bored (Sinise, Armin Mueller-Stahl) or predictably helpless and callow (Jerry O'Connell), plus a final half-hour where Disney patently chases that Contact vibe of squishy sentimentality—redrawing the galactic void as a great place to learn cheesily illustrated science (in a sustained, misbegotten F/X shot) and to reconnect with dead people you love (via a lachrymose montage of "keepsake" images from the film, a device unworthy of the filmmakers).
Anytime filmmakers place too much focus on the "thing", they either can't deliver or find a cop-out ("Contact").
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In a Star Wars-worshiping kid, such awkwardness is understandable.
Pasting all of these scenes together are a series of dialogue scenes, logical connections, and thematic compromises that only the most groveling auteurist—or, I suppose, a viewer who will valorize absolutely anything as long as it doesn't smack of Star Wars—will applaud.
There's pieces of Close Encounters, Dune, Star Wars, even James Cameron's The Abyss scattered liberally throughout this mess.
Or it could be just a coincidence that Brian De Palma should make Mission to Mars, an optimistic outer-space adventure, at roughly the same time David Lynch treated us to the inspired (and G-rated) simplicity of The Straight Story.
There's pieces of Close Encounters, Dune, Star Wars, even James Cameron's The Abyss scattered liberally throughout this mess.
De Palma was on fire from "Sisters" in 1973 through "Scarface" in '83.
There are always at least moments of excellence in many of his films like Sisters (1973), Carrie (1976), Dressed to Kill (1980), Blow Out (1981), Scarface (1983), Casualties of War (1989), Raising Cain (1992), Mission: Impossible (1996), and Snake Eyes (1998).
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Sometimes his cannily constructed thrillers (like "Dressed to Kill" or "Blow Out") have struck me as soulless, even sadistic, technical exercises, slavishly devoted to the gospel of Alfred Hitchcock.
There are always at least moments of excellence in many of his films like Sisters (1973), Carrie (1976), Dressed to Kill (1980), Blow Out (1981), Scarface (1983), Casualties of War (1989), Raising Cain (1992), Mission: Impossible (1996), and Snake Eyes (1998).
In recent years, he has begun to mysteriously slip with ill-fated films such as 2000's " Mission to Mars " and 2006's " The Black Dahlia ," but there was a time when De Palma was able to meticulously zero in on every filmmaking element that, together, formed something breathtakingly intense and seductively beautiful.
It gets especially difficult when discussing such obvious turkeys as The Bonfire of the Vanities (1990) and last year's Mission to Mars.
The inspiration (and I hesistate to use that word in any context associated with this movie) for Mission to Mars is apparently Close Encounters of the Third Kind, but there are also steals from Contact, Apollo 13, The Abyss, and even 1999's The Mummy.