Ghosts of Mars Review - 24 August 2001

Carpenter quickly cuts off what's good about Ghosts

After Pam Grier loses her head in a promising opening scene of butchy banter, Ghosts of Mars just gets worse

GHOSTS OF MARS

James "Desolation" Williams (Ice Cube, left) and Jericho 

(Jason Statham) battle evil Martian ghosts.

Starring Natasha Henstridge, Ice Cube, Jason Statham, Pam Grier, Clea Duvall and Joanna Cassidy.
18A. 98 min.

By KATHERINE MONK

  At one point in John Carpenter's latest schlock attack, Ghosts of Mars, the butt-kicking cop played by Natasha Henstridge makes it to safety after a 20-minute battle sequence with blood-thirsty assailants that nearly leaves her headless.

  She has a chance at making it back home in one piece, but instead of hopping on the next ship back to Earth, she tells the remnants of her crew that they have to go back to the battle zone. "We have to," she says in all earnestness. "This is about dominion."

  In other words, this burnt-orange waste dump of a planet teeming with severed heads and monsters pulled from the park­ing lot of a Marilyn Manson con­cert is a place nice enough to call home.

  Personally, I can think of a lot of things more appealing than living in a concrete bunker on the red, red sands of home — where psychotic bludgeoners and body-pierced ghouls roam.

  Then again, this movie is not aimed at me. I have no idea just who Carpenter was trying to reach with this dreary mess of cartoon violence, lame lines and cosmetics abuse, except perhaps the handful of genuine psy­chotics who feel they, too, have been possessed by Martians — but there's little doubt that even the most hardcore Carpenter fan will find Ghosts of Mars a com­plete disappointment.

  The film had promise. Opening with a scene of butchy banter between team leader Braddock (Pam Grier) and Lieutenant Melanie Ballard (Henstridge), I thought I was about to experi­ence another sci-fi kitsch fest in the spirit of Paul Verhoeven's satirical Starship Troopers. No sooner do we arrive at our desti­nation of a small Martian mining colony, however, than we lose Grier, our tough-talking team leader.

  Poof. Gone. Decapitated just like that.

  Things just get worse from there. In one pathetic sequence, we go from Henstridge telling her macho sergeant that "I might sleep with you if you were the last man on Earth ... and we aren't even on Earth," to necking with him in a storage room five min­utes later.

  If that weren't had enough, the only two people who do have any chemistry -Henstridge and Ice Cube, who plays a dangerous criminal named Desolation Williams (aieee! scary!) — save each others' lives several times over, but don't so much as kiss.

  No logic. No motivation. Bad special effects and little more than a thread of a script, Ghosts of Mars makes the old Star Trek look like Blade Runner.

So I guess in the big picture, the premature decapitation sort of fits the movie perfectly. A loose collage of moronic dia­logue, screaming fits as an excuse for acting, and blurry shots of blood spurting from sev­ered limbs, nothing quite sums up the experience of seeing the mindless movie called Ghosts of Mars like someone losing their head in the first few frames.

  Next time, Mr. Carpenter says "cut" — I hope he doesn't mean it literally.

Vancouver Sun Movie Critic

At Granville, Park & Tilford, SilverCity Metropolis, Eagle Ridge, SilverCity Coquitlam, Richmond Centre, SilverCity Riverport, Colossus Langley, Grande Surrey, SilverCity Guildford, Cottonwood Chilli­wack, Grand Abbotsford, Sil­verCity Mission.

Ghosts of Mars Review - 22 August 2001

Carpenter paints Mars blood-red

Director takes his violent dystopian vision to the Red Planet in John Carpenter's Ghosts of Mars

Vancouver Sun Article 

by Jamie Portman

  John Carpenter figures it's good for business to be a pessimist. That's because his business is making horror movies which are usually set in the future. Is any director in his right mind going to make a "happy" his horror movie? Obviously not.

Big Daddy Mars (Richard Cetrone) lead his warriors to battle
in John Carpenter's Ghosts of Mars.

  "There's no drama in a future Utopia because everybody's happy," explains Carpenter, who at 53 has the aura of a white-maned, mildly eccentric acade­mic.    "There's no conflict at all. So I usually think of situations with futures that are kind of darker than what we have now. Things are going to get worse and into that you put a character that’s either an anti-hero or someone who's resentful against the sys­tem."

  This formula served Carpenter's needs when he set out to write and direct Ghosts of Mars. In the new Screen Gems film opening Friday, he envisages a colonized Mars 175 years into the future and comes up with a hellhole environment in which the (640,000 Earthlings who have settled, on the planet to mine its vast natural I resources are threatened with a dead­ly menace — a long-dormant Martian civilization whose demented warriors are systematically taking over the bod­ies of the human intruders. Carpenter throws a couple of formidable human protagonists into the pot — Canada's Natasha Henstridge as a kick-ass Mars police lieutenant and the hulking Ice Cube as a guy called Desolation who's also the planet's most notorious crim­inal.

  Carpenter, who first made his mark with low-budget shockers such as Assault on Precinct 13 before achieving international fame with Halloween in 1978, has wanted to make a Mars movie for nearly two decades.

  "Throughout our civilized history, Mars has been a symbolic deal to human beings. Mars himself was the god of war, of blood lust, passion, death ... all that kind of good stuff that movies are made of." But for a long time, Carpenter couldn't find a plot idea for the kind of Mars movie he wanted to make. Finally, about three years ago an idea started to jell.

  "I started thinking: maybe we could do a situation where the planet has started to be colonized. I didn't want to do a space-helmet movie." Here, Carpenter pauses to give an imitation

of actors mumbling incoherently behind the glass in their helmets.

(left to right) Desolation Williams (Ice Cube) and
director John Carpenter during filming.

"That just wasn't of any interest to me. But if you have a colony on Mars, what would it be really like? Well, because of the environment and the winds and the sand and the fact that radiation would come down, everything would have to be built like an industrial-age stronghold. High tech wouldn't work. You'd have to live in bunkers. If there was a train on Mars, it would have to be made of iron and really have to withstand that kind of

environment."

  All these elements were incorporat­ed in the screenplay which Carpenter and co-writer Larry Sulkis fashioned. But it turns out that, in his heart, Car­penter really thinks he's made a western. It seems he's had a passion for westerns dating back to his childhood. "I thought: this is the American fron­tier. Now I can make a western. That's primarily what I was interested in."

  He's given a couple of extra twists to the movie. For example, a matriarchal society is in charge of the Earth and its colonies. "I'd never seen that before in a movie," he says proudly. "It's a first." He sees the situation this way: "The Earth is overpopulated in the future ... we have too many people and we've ruined the environment. So perhaps the patriarchy has been upended and the women will run things because they control reproduction."

  The other wrinkle is provided by the hideous Martian ghosts with their painted faces and penchant for impal­ing human heads on spikes. Carpenter got the idea for them one day "at about 2 a.m. and I was having a beer and needed to write something down.

  "These ghosts that are left on Mars, that take us over and turn us into them they're an ancient race, a kind of warlike savage race, so I looked back

on all the warlike savage races, the primitive cultures in order to see what they did. Well, they painted their faces They pierced themselves. They chopped heads off. They sometimes played football with the heads: that was a big deal — to kind of own your enemy. They did all sorts of weird stuff."

  The film is full of flashbacks — a late change to the screenplay. Carpenter says the original script "was written in a linear fashion — and it read dull. So the way to deal with it was to scramble it all up ...."

  Carpenter is the first to admit that the film offers his own personal vision of the Martian landscape. "It's not; realistic Mars. This is a stylized Mars. The colour of Mars is not the kind of colour we have. If you look at the Viking photos, it's pink. Well, I'm not going to do a pink horror movie so we made it a really dark red orange."