Subject: Review: Ghosts of Mars (2001)

From: Mark R. Leeper <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 28 Aug 2001 02:32:06 -0000

GHOSTS OF MARS
               A film review by Mark R. Leeper

    CAPSULE: In 2176 on the planet Mars police taking into custody
    an accused murderer face the title menace.  There is a lot of
    fighting and not a whole lot of story otherwise.  John
    Carpenter reprises so many ideas from his previous films,
    especially ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13, that the new film comes off
    as his homage to himself.  Rating: 4 (0 to 10), 0 (-4 to +4).

John Carpenter apparently believes that action scenes in which
people fight something horrible are the same as horror scenes.
For a writer and director of horror films, supposedly an expert on
horror, it is a very bad mistake to make.  GHOSTS OF MARS is
called a horror movie, but it is more just a drawn out fight
between humans and a surprisingly low-powered alien menace.  In
addition if anybody but John Carpenter had made GHOSTS OF MARS,
Carpenter would have grounds to sue.  This film is just chock full
of pieces taken from ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13, THE THING, and PRINCE
OF DARKNESS.  It is, in fact, surprising that Carpenter managed to
fit so many pieces of his previous work into this film in such an
admittedly novel way.  But that still does not make for a really
good science fiction experience.

GHOSTS OF MARS takes place in the year 2176.  Mars has been mostly
terraformed so that humans can walk on the surface without
breathing gear (which is good for the film's budget).  It is never
mentioned, but the gravity on Mars has been increased somehow to
earth-normal, again making it easier to film.  Society has changed
a bit by that time, but it has advanced surprisingly little.
Apparently the culture has changed so that women are much more in
positions of control.  And from Carpenter's view, women have
really made a mess of things.  Society has stagnated under female
control so that beyond some minor technological advances society
has changed less in 175 years than we might expect it to change in
ten.

The basic plot of GHOSTS OF MARS has much in common with that of
ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13 except that Precinct 9 (yes, Precinct 9)
has been replaced by a somewhat tacky looking rundown Martian
mining colony.  Instead of having the criminal "Napolean" Wilson,
this film has the criminal "Desolation" Williams.  Instead of
facing hoodlums with automatic weapons the police face, well,
ghosts of Mars.  Because the ghosts are somewhat alien in nature
they should behave in some alien manner, but they essentially
behave as human savages, in another lapse of imagination.  The
story is told in flashback, flashback within flashback, and
flashback within flashback within flashback.

GHOSTS OF MARS takes place entirely at night and is filmed almost
entirely in tones of red, yellow, and black.  Carpenter manages to
give us a powerful opening scene, showing a mining train rushing
through the Martian night to the sound of music with a heavy beat.
Sadly what follows is not really up to the buildup.  The terror he
creates looks a little too much like fugitive wannabes from the
rock band Kiss.  His idea of building suspense is having a bunch
of sudden jump scenes that sucker the viewer into thinking
something scary is happening and then prove to be just something
boring.  These are standard haunted house film shock effects that
require no great talent to give the audience.  Somewhat newer but
also unimpressive are the CGI digital decapitations in some of the
fights.

Within a short stretch of time we have seen the release of MISSION
TO MARS, RED PLANET, and GHOSTS OF MARS.  After MISSION TO MARS
was panned by too many reviewers it looks better and better and
better as time goes by.  I rate GHOSTS OF MARS a 4 on the 0 to 10
scale and a 0 on the -4 to +4 scale.

Following the movie I showed my wife, who liked GHOSTS OF MARS
moderately more than I did, Carpenter's classic ASSAULT ON
PRECINCT 13.  Her comment is that it was seeing the same film
twice.

     Mark R. Leeper
     [email-masked]
     Copyright 2001 Mark R. Leeper

--
Mark R. Leeper, <[email-masked]>
http://www.geocities.com/markleeper/
Or try your search engine on "Mark Leeper"

==========
X-RAMR-ID: 29357
X-Language: en
X-RT-ReviewID: 246523
X-RT-TitleID: 1109551
X-RT-AuthorID: 1309
X-RT-RatingText: 4/10