What's supposed to be a routine pick-up of a suspected murderer turns into a huge mess when it seems that everyone in the mining town where he was arrested has gone insane, running around cutting people's heads off and talking in weird languages. Oh, and it takes place on a Mars we've almost terraformed. Ten more years to a breathable atmosphere! Great, that's how many years until Earth's is entirely ruined!
I don't know why John Carpenter decided to take the approach of presenting the whole thing as a flashback. Having Natasha Hentridge's character tell as her making a report where she's the only survivor kinda takes all the suspense out of it. I mean, Ice Cube and Pam Grier are both in the cast (plus a Jason Statham who still had hair), if you show us without giving any clue as to the final outcome, I'd have watched the movie giving either of them a decent chance to survive.
(Ice Cube did survive, but again, there was nothing about the story that demanded it be told in this way. If you just start from the beginning and go forward, it's still has a chance to be surprising.)
Although it feels more like an action movie trying to wear the clothes of a horror movie. You're up against something left over by the original inhabitants of Mars. Some genetic memory that infects and takes over people, that moves as a giant cloud. If you kill a host, they just find another. So they can drive the invaders off their world. Which is bad, obviously. I guess because the Martians no longer have corporeal bodies of their own, so they don't get property rights any more. Or maybe Carpenter's trying to be clever when Hentridge says, "It's about dominion. It's not their planet any more."
But nothing about this movie screams "clever". The last scene is Hentridge and Ice Cube exchanging witty banter while holding MAC-10s made of seemingly solid chrome, even though they've literally tried using an exploding nuclear plant to stop this thing and failed. Oh, but Bad Boys' style gunplay will save the day. Maybe you can slide down a railing while shooting like Chow Yun Fat for good measure.
I really think there's a good horror movie in there, but it lost under all the shooting. I wonder if John Carpenter had been playing a lot of Doom when he got the idea to make this or something.
3 comments:
John Carpenter is one of my favourite directors, but yeah, I'm not sure what was going on with him in this period. It doesn't feel like one of his films, and it doesn't look like one either.
I'm not as up on Carpenter's work, but it definitely didn't feel like what I expect his movies to be like. And the sets and the buildings and whatnot seemed really cheap-looking.
This is the film that drove him away from Hollywood, but I don't know what sort of production difficulties there were. Carpenter directed it, wrote it, and did the soundtrack, so that suggests that it's his baby, but it's unlike him to produce such a mess.
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