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The movie was Brian De Palma's "Mission to Mars," and only when we arrived in New York and I tuned back into the media did I learn what readers who follow the press coverage of movies already know -- that "Mission to Mars" got the year's worst reviews, a spanking almost as severe as that received by an earlier De Palma film, "Bonfire of the Vanities." (See here for Andrew O'Hehir's pan in Salon, and here for Salon's coverage of the film's unhappy reception generally.)

Friends told me of press screenings where viewers jeered the film, and after a first weekend of strong business, audiences for the film are growing sparse. The reviewers' criticisms? The movie is slow, it's unconvincing, it's preposterous, it's overly solemn. Rumor has it that De Palma was so humiliated by his notices that he canceled all his publicity. "Mission to Mars," the world seems to have concluded, just doesn't work.

I beg to differ: it sure worked for me. I'd like to suggest that it might work for a few other viewers too -- at least, if you don't go to it expecting a big corporate space jam. Instead, it's introverted and reflective, less a conventional clash-of-conflicting-desires drama than a mournful, sweet ballad on the themes of fate, adventure, and near-misses. It's narrative poetry in the guise of an outer-space adventure -- not such a strange combination, if you think of something like Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner."

It has to be admitted that De Palma's movies are a special case. He has never had much gift for conventional persuasiveness. The acting in his movies can look college-production awkward, and, although he has featured such actors as Robert DeNiro and John Travolta early in their careers, he sometimes makes bumbling casting mistakes. (Here, Armin Muehler-Stahl is as heavy-spirited and hammy as ever). De Palma has always struck me as a born avant-gardist, a Donald Barthelme or Godard type who has applied himself conscientiously to the making of conventional pop movies. Perhaps he appeals most to people for whom art is a game anyway, and who don't need a lot of persuading in order to join in.

For those who do find his wavelength, "Mission to Mars" offers a jaunty and gallant Tim Robbins; Don Cheadle doing a good job of suggesting mental horsepower and technical expertise; and a real find in Connie Nielsen, a poised Swedish beauty who suggests a sleeker Isabella Rossellini equipped with three or four advanced degrees. (Hats off to De Palma and his screenwriters, too, for creating a female character who feels her emotions completely, yet isn't incapacitated by them.) There are some beautifully done stretches where De Palma takes you inside the kinds of mental states you might experience during moments of panic, as well as unusual moments when you're drawn into a character's cerebrations. Gary Sinise, playing a hurtin' astronaut who feels he has nothing to lose, may not be the ideal actor for this role -- he's gloomy where he needs to be warm -- but he comes through at his best here. The movie also offers some silent-movie style visual poetry, corny, obvious images that are transcended by feeling and audacity.

It also offers some genuine thought and reflection -- and not the usual art-and-entertainment-world, gender/power/class/race crapola. De Palma is genuinely a science-idea-driven filmmaker -- when I interviewed him some years ago, I found him guarded and perverse. Then I ventured the thought that I was convinced his thriller "The Fury" -- like "Mission to Mars," occasionally preposterous on the surface but brilliant underneath -- was really all about cybernetics (a science that studies feedback and control, and that has been of intense interest to people in computers and neuroscience), and riffed on how the film's themes, organization and staging suggested circuitry and feedback loops of both the electronic and organic type.

He brightened up and told me he'd written a thesis in college on cybernetics, and from then on the interview went swimmingly. (The Times the other day ran a story about some scientists who have proposed that a meteorite shower millions of years ago perhaps seeded the earth -- an idea not far from one of the major ideas in the film.) "Mission to Mars" could be said to be about the human cost of our involvement in our ideas and adventures, and about how that cost makes us ask ourselves some of the big questions: Why, for instance, are we forever getting ourselves into these predicaments? And what are the sources of our drives?

Here are some tips about what to watch for in the film. Look for circles and spirals, the way circles are always morphing into spirals, and the ways De Palma associates these shapes with dance and rhythm: the pulsing double helixes, the twister that swallows the crew in the first act, the way blood and soda spiral around in weightlessness -- images that made me, for one, gasp at their beauty. Even the film's telescoping narrative suggests a spiral -- it begins in great circling camera moves set to swirling Louisiana music, moves through several apparent protagonists, and ends with a blastoff through a column of luminous swirling debris. Watch for the use of toys, models and rehearsals. An early emergency occurs when a micrometeorite breaks through a touch-screen the astronauts are using to prepare for dealing with emergencies. Suddenly they're contending with an emergency they had no way of anticipating.

Next page | You've never seen a movie where so much of it is upside down, circular, or rotating