Ghosts of Mars

Let's talk about Ghosts of Mars. It more or less ended John Carpenter's career (at least until The Ward which I think is pretty underrated) and arguably for good reason: the movie feels like someone trying to make a John Carpenter movie and missing the mark by a pretty substantial margin.

I can find things to like about it because I love John Carpenter movies and siege movies, but there's way too much you need to forgive to enjoy it. Generally, I'm going to try to avoid discussing whether a movie is good or bad because there are plenty of places out there to get reviews and that's not really what I want to do with this blog. I want to talk about what does or doesn't work and why specifically and avoid the blatantly dismissing or accepting movies wholesale. Plus I want these blog entries to be conversation starters and there's really no faster way to end a conversation than to declare an absolute truth. 

But, yeah, okay, fine, with all those disclaimers out of the way, I'll just say it: Ghosts of Mars is a bad movie. I don't think that's a very controversial statement. But what makes it bad also makes it kind of fascinating (and really sad): it feels like you can reverse-engineer the studio notes that were handed to John Carpenter and seemingly ruined the movie's chances of even falling into the category of trashy awesome like They Live or Big Trouble in Little China. And here we go with the spoilers. You've been warned. Also, just want to make this absolutely clear: unless I cite a source (i.e. “Carpenter says on the commentary track...”), anything and everything I say about what went on behind the scenes is pure speculation and inference.

So, for starters, let's talk about the flashback structure: it's kind of terrible. On the commentary track, Carpenter claims that he used that as a device to try to make genre conventions feel a little more fresh. I hope he's covering the studio's ass by taking responsibility for that one because if he did in fact write the flashback structure into the screenplay before they started shooting, then there's no excuse for how fucking sloppily it's executed. 

First of all, straight up, it doesn't feel like it was shot with a flashback structure in mind. So it works like this if you haven't seen the movie in awhile: Natasha Henstridge is talking to the Mars board of, um, government or something. She tells them something, they stop her and ask what Jason Statham with hair was up to. She tells them she can only tell them what he reported to her. Then we hop back in time to when Jason Statham with hair walked away from Natasha Henstridge and follow his side of the story.

Every time we come back to the initial, choose-your-own-adventure point, it's the same shot that we saw previously. That's fine in and of itself, but it does suggest that maybe it wasn't planned, i.e., was re-shot one afternoon. But whatever, the recurring shot also grounds us in a particular point in time and lets us know exactly where we are, so like I said, no big deal.

But then the idea of the flashbacks feel awkward from a structural standpoint; what exactly is she telling the government officials? What we're seeing is full of details no one would ever report. Which, yeah, I know, it's a movie, it's a conceit, fair enough. It just seems like if they'd made that decision early on, Carpenter and his co-writer, Larry Sulkis, could have maybe found a way to streamline the narrative a little more by limiting the POV. I mean, it's kind of fucking weird to employ a structure in which the entire narrative is a single character's flashback and tell the story from an omniscient POV.

I can deal with it, though, nothing noted above is really a movie killer, it's just a bunch of...odd, let's say, choices. The other damage that the flashback structure does to the narrative, though, is that it pretty much let us know who's going to live and die. Not that we don't know that by the five minute mark anyway, but, I don't know, can't we all agree to pretend to be surprised?

But where it gets really irritating and unforgivable is the dialogue: it seems like the studio (or maybe Carpenter and Sulkis) thought people might show up half an hour late or nap through most of the first act or something. People talk about the fact that they're on Mars damn near constantly and repeat more or less the same information about themselves and each other until shit hits the fan. That's not quite literally true, but it's not too much of an exaggeration, either. Bad dialogue is a pet peeve of mine as is sloppy exposition and in this movie, it's...it's just really annoying.

I'm not really going to touch on the casting issues too much, but it's rumored that Jason Statham and Ice Cube were cast in each others' roles up until a few weeks before shooting and the studio forced Carpenter to swap them out at the last minute because Ice Cube was a bigger name. And, well, a lot of Ice Cube's dialogue would work a little better coming from a British guy and Statham's dialogue feels more appropriate for a black guy. For example, Statham while trying to seduce Henstridge says something like there aren't too many English guys around and he wouldn't want her to miss her chance to have sex with one. Now...I don't think the British are particularly well known for being well-hung or having overwhelming sexual prowess, are they?Nor do they have a reputation as uniquely bad lovers, they just...that's a '90s black guy thing (which I think is actually a fairly racist stereotype harkening back to the noble savage idea and the concept that they're mysterious and/or more animalistic, but that's another conversation altogether). Again, it's just kinda fucking weird

Shit, I gotta keep moving. There's way more that doesn't work about this movie and this review's getting long.

Let's stick with the first act for a second: what's with all those weird-ass time lapse dissolves that skip over maybe two seconds worth of action? It feels like the studio demanded a ninety minute run time (which is definitely not unheard of) and Carpenter and his editor, Paul C. Warschilka, cut the movie to the absolute bone (a little more atmosphere up front would go a long way toward making this movie more watchable), but they were still in the two hour vicinity and the studio said “the fact that cutting anything else at this point would make the movie incoherent sounds like a YP, not an MP. Make it shorter, we don't give a shit how.” And I'm guessing that's what happened.

Pushing forward to the action scenes, this is a really strange complaint for Carpenter, a man known for his love of wide angle lenses, but it feels like they didn't get enough wide shots to quite make the geography of the scenes clear. With pretty much every battle sequence, we start wide on people approaching each other to fight and/or our heroes shooting at the ghost/zombies, but once the battle proper starts, the scene devolves into a series of sort of vignettes of individual characters fighting cross-cut with one another, but without enough information to figure out where they are in relation to each other. I can't go after Carpenter too harshly for this because 1) he mentions on the commentary that they lost seven shooting days when Henstridge got sick (though I have no idea what was scheduled for those days) and 2) shooting and cutting action is fucking hard. It's not like I could do a better job and it's not like the action scenes are totally incoherent, they just...could be better is all. And Carpenter has shot better action scenes in the past.

Ooh, and as long as we're on the topic of “how did John Carpenter of all people make THAT mistake,” the entire thing feels really over-lit; the whole time, I found myself wondering who thought an action/horror movie didn't need a lot of contrast. To be fair, it is more of a western than a horror movie and westerns tend to be lit more like comedy than, say, film noir: we want to see everything, especially the depth of the landscape. But still, from what I remember, Carpenter is generally pretty comfortable with deep blacks and I'm not exactly sure why he stepped away from that here, especially considering the entire movie takes place at night in an artificially lit environment; you could light it pretty much any way you wanted to.

Okay, so what works? Honestly, I find the ghost/zombie things pretty creepy. Is that embarrassing? Yes, they look like Marilyn Manson wannabes, but that doesn't mean they don't creep me out just a little. Um, other than that...I don't know. I like the sub-genre and I root so hard for Carpenter that I'm inclined to be really forgiving, so once the shit hits the fan, I'm more or less on board. Sure, there are still plenty of moments that make me wince (oh, god, that last line. That last fucking line), but I can enjoy it anyway because I pretty much AM the target audience. And, I know by next week, I'll have forgotten how bad it was and sometime in the next couple years, I'll find myself thinking, “hmm, Ghosts of Mars wasn't that bad, was it? I mean, I know I didn't like it, but maybe I just didn't quite get it. I'll watch it again and I'm sure this time it'll click!” (For the record, I've seen Ghosts of Mars three times so far, so...yeah...but next time it'll definitely work for me!)

But, I don't know, if your target audience finds this much to complain about, then...well, then the movie definitely has some issues, I guess.