It is the year 2020, and NASA's flyboys still love their wives,
drive nifty future-Isuzus, and
enjoy bags of Dr. Pepper in zero-gravity. Their mission is to
go to Mars, set up the rudiments of a self-supporting colony,
and search for Brian DePalma's talent, which has suddenly gone
AWOL. De Palma's second stinker in a row, Mission To Mars
is at least less nasty and more visually diverting than Snake
Eyes. Intended as an uplifting adventure rip-off of Apollo
13 and Contact, it wholly fails at matching the former's
flyboy camaraderie and genuine tension while succeeding in reproducing
the schmaltzy improbability of the latter. Every shot and line
of dialogue in the first 20 minutes of Mission to Mars
is clumsy, obvious Exposition. Except for a few zero-G effects,
every scene set inside the spaceship clunks and fizzles. The computer-generated
prospects brighten somewhat when the astronauts get out of the
cabin and zip about in open space with their Jetson-packs, and
clamber around on Mars, and the Big Idea connecting the famous
Mars Face with ancestors of humanity is more stirring than some
random Alien-type space monster (see Supernova)
would be. As usual, Don Cheadle is worth watching, but Gary Sinise
is a listless hero, Tim Robbins a surprisingly off-key co-stud,
and Connie Nielsen (whose generic euro-accent and aristocratic
mien fit in nicely in Gladiator)
is here almost as brutally irrelevant an action-babe as Saffron
Burrows in Deep Blue Sea. In the end it turns out Brian
DePalma's talent has belatedly followed his buddy George Lucas
into another galaxy far, far away.