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You've never seen a movie where so much of it is upside down, circular, or rotating. De Palma swoops in, right through windows and other barriers, on his space-suited characters as they float about, or walk around in circles. He's suggesting the fun and fact of weightlessness, of course, but also the giddiness of that domain we're all getting to know called cyberspace, and perhaps the experience of thought itself. Watch also for the way the number three keeps recurring, and let yourself play with its resonances and suggestions: mother/father/child, the three acts of conventional drama, the three main parts of the human body, the three orders of classical architecture. The Christian Trinity, also: De Palma makes a point of always having someone say, when experiencing terror or surprise, "Jesus," or "My God."

There's a real vision here -- of life as a game that, whether we want it to or not, will always get serious on us; an almost Tantric vision of women (the circle) and men (the column) attaining occasional bliss (the spiral) together; of art and religion as the outs that our fate occasionally permits us. And it's a vision of the place of ideas and belief in our lives. The film might be said to be a meditation on origins and destinies, couplehood and death, and the fate of pictorial storytelling in the age of the computer -- motifs and themes that are braided through the film with a complexity that suggests two great late Chris Marker films, "Sans Soleil" and "The Last Bolshevik."

Why did the press come down so heavily on "Mission to Mars"? On a surface level, the film certainly isn't as convincing or dynamic as it perhaps ought to be. But there's plenty of high-quality urgent realism to be had these days -- "Law and Order," for instance, is on TV nearly every night. Why insist on it from every work of dramatic entertainment? Some reviewers complained that when emergencies occurred, the astronauts remained too poker-faced. But many people enter a deliberate, calm state during emergencies. Do we really need the usual flashing red lights, and extras rushing about as though supplying background action for "E.R."? The film is certainly unusual -- internalized, yet played out as spectacle. But at least some reviewers are familiar with the likes of Tarkovsky's legendary "Solaris," no winner of anyone's awards for plausibility or peppy editing. And is the film's much-ridiculed dialog really worse than the dialog in "2001" or "Aliens"? Really? The film was even mocked for its space creature -- but she struck me as a witty fusion of the Roswell alien and a Cambodian Buddha, along with suggestions of E.T.; in a nice touch, her frog eyes echo Sinise's.

Is it unfair of me to wonder aloud whether, at a time when ironic or edgy media gloating is the preferred tone, the film's combination of intellectuality and emotional straightforwardness was hard for reviewers to process? But perhaps they really just didn't enjoy the film. Too bad -- there's much there to love. Here's my tip for those who know and respond to some of De Palma's work: "Mission to Mars" is one of his tender, personal films, like "Blow Out" and "Casualties of War." For those who have never tuned in to his movies, this isn't the one that will win you over, though I don't think even on a surface level it's as bad as it's been made out to be.

For everyone else: Why not try "Mission to Mars"? If you don't mind forgiving some surface gaffes and letting the film's deeper structures go to work on you, you might find yourself enjoying some unusual visions. Late in the film, Sinise is being prepared for a long journey. He steps into a lighted circle, is encased in a glass column (those circles! those columns!), and is submerged in a clear, roiling liquid. In a panic, he holds his breath until he can't hold it anymore. The air finally bursts out of him -- but then he finds he can get oxygen from the fluid. Is he a baby in a womb or a living exhibit? Is he dying or in ecstasy? In any case, this questing, melancholy searcher is finally going home. "Mission to Mars" is a nerd's rhapsody.
salon.com | March 16, 2000

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