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."