Apr 062001
 
three reels

In 2176 on a partially terraformed Mars, Police lieutenant Melanie Ballard (Natasha Henstridge) is discovered by the Martian authorities to be the only occupant of an arriving train. She recounts the events leading to the situation: Ballard, her commander (Pam Grier), Sgt Jericho (Jason Statham) and two new officers (Cleas DuVall, Liam Waite), arrived at an outpost town to pick up the dangerous criminal Desolation Williams (Ice Cube) and found all of the civilians slaughtered. Only prisoners in locked cells survived, including tight-lipped scientist Whitlock (Joanna Cassidy). It appeared the miners had gone insane and would be coming for the officers and prisoners soon.

Ghost of Mars gets a bad rap. It failed at the box office and as a sci-fi horror flick from the master, John Carpenter, it was a disappointment. But it shouldn’t have been. It had been more than a decade since Carpenter’s glory years and while Ghost of Mars is going to sink in comparison to The Thing or Big Trouble in Little China, it stands pretty tall next to his 90’s output like Memoirs of an Invisible Man and Village of the Damned. The problem is people were expecting something groundbreaking. Instead you get a nice, little, b-movie, action pic. The complaint I hear is that it looks cheap, but really it looks inexpensive, and there is a difference. There’s no big set pieces. No extensive special effects. But what is there looks fine. The makeup is good. The fights are exciting. The crappy, little outpost town looks like what a crappy little outpost town might look like on Mars. This is a little picture, not an extravaganza, and with proper expectations, it is a lot of fun.

The story is simple, but with just the proper dose of mythic sci-fi mumbo-jumbo to work. It works so well that Doctor Who stole it for one of its most popular episodes, The Waters of Mars. (Did they pay for it? Really, because we are talking plagiarism here.) This is an action/thriller, so not a lot of time is spent on the science fiction side. That’s all stage dressing while our heroes and anti-heroes fret, argue, and shoot a lot of bad guys. However, Carpenter does suggest a complex world that gives the picture the feeling that it is something more. Mars is a matriarchal society, where “breeders” are rare, sex is just for fun, and power is in the hands of a few. It’s just a line dropped here and there, but I appreciate the lip service to this being a different world. And the film gets a boost from an unreliable narrator. We aren’t seeing what happened, only what a police officer with a bit of a drug habit says happened. You can make a game out of spotting the bits where she might be making herself look better than she was.

Henstridge is spot-on as a tough as nails action hero. Statham is at home in this kind of picture and the only problem with Grier is we don’t get a lot more of her. The film’s one true failing, however, is with that cast: Ice Cube. He never for a moment seems like someone on Mars, or even a character in this film. He’s just doing the same Ice Cube thing he always does (Statham is in a similar boat, but Statham has charm). Desolation Williams isn’t the nihilistic anarchist he is supposed to be, but just Ice Cube in a grumpy mood. Early in the film’s production, when the proposed title was Escape from Mars, the character was going to be a variation on Escape from New York’s Snake Plisskin. Unfortunately, that didn’t work out and we get Ice Cube dragging down the movie.

If you are looking for a grand epic, Ghosts of Mars will disappoint. But for a throwback, small-scale, action flick for a Saturday afternoon, it’s a qualified success.