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His beloved slow motion is here translated into the free-floating weightlessness of zero gravity, and the camera (in some scenes mounted on four separate axes) seems to be floating along with the characters. De Palma, who returns to themes from picture to picture, developing and expanding them each time, finds new uses for most of his familiar touches. It's intimate and tender and hushed, done in long, quiet takes that not only allow the actors to establish a rapport but also allow us to feel as if we're floating in space with them (an effect enhanced by Ennio Morricone's lyrical and understated score, one of his best). "Mission to Mars" is not what people expect from a mainstream science-fiction extravaganza.
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This is the level of inquiry in a movie dismissed by most critics as cheap sci-fi, a strain of thought and feeling about both art and life that wouldn't be out of place in the movies of Chris Marker or Godard. Concerned with the wonders and limits of technology, and how we can use it without sacrificing our humanity, De Palma is addressing one of the key concerns of filmmaking, especially in an era when special effects threaten to supplant humanity in our movies. When De Palma shows us Sinise watching home movies of his dead wife, or when an orbiting space station team watches a cheery time-delayed transmission from Cheadle and his crew at the very moment that, working on the surface of Mars, they are being decimated, we're seeing a vision of technology as the inadequate repository of memory. Later, there's a stunning cut from Sinise's imagining that the footprint he makes in a child's sandbox is the first human footprint on Mars (his dreamed-of destiny, thwarted by his wife's death) to a remote-controlled toy truck transmitting pictures of the rocky red Mars surface.Īs in most De Palma films, technology is never insulating it never saves his characters from the pain and loss dredged up by the mysteries they use it to solve. In the opening shot, we watch a launched rocket that turns out to be a child's toy.
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Dr Pepper and M&M's are just some of the tools they employ to puzzle out the problems. The movie's astronaut-heroes are all-American versions of the gadgeteer heroes of past De Palma films, using technology to solve the mysteries confronting them. (The team is rounded out by Jerry O'Connell's Bill, the resident young hotshot.) How they get to Mars, and what they find there, present the astronauts with their real struggle: maintaining their bonds of loyalty and humanity in the midst of this new world. He and his wife, Maggie (Kim Delaney of "NYPD Blue"), were supposed to fulfill that role before her death.
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That has its own painful associations for Jim McConnell (Gary Sinise). The team's commanders, Woody and Terri (Tim Robbins, in one of his best performances, and whip-smart Swedish actress Connie Nielsen), are the first married couple on a manned mission. The story follows a rescue team sent to investigate an ominous, staticky transmission from Don Cheadle's Luke Graham, one of a group of astronauts who'd gone to Mars earlier to establish a base camp. More than any filmmaker now working, De Palma communicates his meanings almost entirely in visual terms. A critic who can't recognize the visual rhapsody of this movie (and I'm not talking about the special effects) is about as trustworthy as a blind dance critic. I can imagine someone liking movies and not liking "Mission to Mars," but essentially I agree with White. That's the kind of overstatement that offers the most direct route to the truth. "It can be said with certainty that any reviewer who pans does not understand movies, let alone like them," White wrote. Last March, as Brian De Palma's "Mission to Mars" was being savaged by nearly every critic in the country, Armond White, the passionate film critic for the New York Press, threw down the gauntlet. Touchstone widescreen (2.35:1 aspect ratio)Įxtras: Making-of featurette, animation-to-scene comparison, audio commentary, visual-effects analysis, more
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Starring Gary Sinise, Don Cheadle, Connie Nielsen, Tim Robbins