Ghosts of Mars (2001) | Sci-Fi Saturdays

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Did someone say g-g-g-ghosts?

John Carpenter’s Ghosts of Mars presents a mildly tense, sci-fi action film set on Mars. While appropriately named, it ends up being lethargic and lacking in any real hook to draw the audience in.

First Impressions

Somewhere, presumably on Mars, some people accidentally release an ancient evil–presumably ghosts. During a routine prisoner transport the officers are confronted with a riot or an outbreak and must learn to trust each other in order to survive. It’s a crazy looking, high-concept John Carpenter film. Time to see if there are really Ghosts of Mars.

Presented below is the trailer for the film.

The Fiction of The Film

In the year 2176 the planet Mars is 84% terraformed with over 640,000 colonists. A mysterious force has been unleashed and moving out of the Southern Valley toward the town of Chryse. The most recent incident occurred at Shining Canyon Mine days ago with one survivor returning on a train, Lt. Melanie Ballard (Natasha Henstridge). She meets with a tribunal and tells her story.

Her security team was to travel to Shining Canyon and pick up Desolation WIlliams (Ice Cube) as a routine prisoner transfer back to Chryse. When their train arrives there is no one in town, which is strange for a Friday night. Ballard and Sgt. Butler (Jason Statham) discover the prisoners still locked in their cages, but the other team led by Commander Helena Braddock (Pam Grier) find bodies hanging upside down in the rec-facility, all dead.

Williams claims he didn’t commit the murders that he’s accused of, which mirror the bodies found by the team. Elsewhere, Braddock investigates some strange goings on and disappears. Butler finds her head on a pike, and a large group of people with ritualistic piercings and tattoos killing people and being amped up by a single man, identified in the credits as Big Daddy Mars (Richard Cetrone). Butler finds three people alive and takes them back to the Jail with him.

The men are here to help Williams bust out of jail and attempt to take over, but Ballard convinces them they need to work together about whatever is outside. A crazy dispatch officer is killed and some presence transfers from her body into one of the civilian prisoners, who they smartly leave behind. The remaining four officers, Williams and his three associates, and three civilians head for the train.

Whitlock (Joanna Cassidy) explains that she was part of a group that uncovered whatever has been possessing the people on the planet. An evil that was dormant, which she released. With no train at the station, they return to the jail, when Ballard is possessed. Butler gives her one of her illegal pills (tetramonochloride, nicknamed Clear), which forces the “ghost” out of her body. When the train shows up, Big Daddy Mars leads hundreds of possessed miners in a raid of the town. Only five of the group survive to make it to the train.

Partway out of the station Ballard turns them around realizing they need to stop these creatures by blowing up the nuclear reactor. After setting the charges Whitlock is possessed and officer Kincaid (Clea DuVall), Butler, and the two train engineers are killed. The explosion detonates with uncertain results. On the way back into town, Williams handcuffs Ballard to a bed and leaves. Ballard concludes the story to the tribunal and returns to her quarters. She is awoken by a security alert. The ghosts are approaching the town. Williams re-appears, tosses Ballard a gun and the two head off to kick some more ass.

“We got a chance to stop this thing before it goes any further. This is about one thing: dominion. It’s not their planet anymore.” – Lt. Melanie Ballard

History in the Making

John Carpenter’s penultimate film, Ghosts of Mars is an attempt to mashup the horror and science-fiction genres but does neither particularly well. Known to many as the Master of Horror, Carpenter’s list of horror films includes many classics including The Fog, Prince of Darkness, The Thing, and the original Halloween. He is equally known for his sci-fi films including Dark Star, Escape From New York, Starman, and They Live. But just because someone has made classic films in the past, doesn’t mean they still can’t make a clunker, which on many levels, Ghosts of Mars is. This would be Carpenter’s last film for almost a decade. How much of that was due to the bad reviews received by the film? No one may know. But he would return in 2010 with The Ward, which has been his last directorial project to date.

The film also comes as the last in a small resurgence of Mars related films. Not since the early 1950s has Hollywood released multiple projects about the red planet within the same year. After taking nearly two decades off of Mars-themed projects, the 1990s saw Total Recall and Mars Attacks as the sole reminders of Mars related science-fiction. However 2000 released Mission to Mars and Red Planet (both to be reviewed next month on Sci-Fi Saturdays) followed the next year by Ghosts of Mars. Quite a coincidence. These titles, and this mini-resurgence in interest in our nearest planetary neighbor may have come from the real-world launch of Mars Pathfinder, a NASA rover that landed on the planet in 1997 to explore and send back imagery and data from the red planet. It was followed by the less successful Mars Polar Lander and Deep Space 2 which were unable to complete their missions. Currently Curiosity and Perseverance rovers remain deployed and active on the planet, sending back imagery and data for scientific study. No word yet on ghosts.

Ghosts of Mars has a number of notable actors in it. The film stars Natasha Henstridge who was still a relative newcomer, having made slightly more than a dozen films since her debut in 1995s Species. She was also known for its sequel, Species II, as well as The Whole Nine Yards. Having Henstridge as a female protagonist was nothing new for Carpenter, as a number of his early films had female leads. But with the breakthrough of the strong female leads from films like Alien or Terminator 2: Judgment Day, it created another twist to the classic genre tropes that Carpenter could subvert. The male lead was played by Ice Cube who was surprisingly a decade into his acting career, having started in Boyz n the Hood in 1991, and made this his first sci-fi film. I also didn’t expect to see Jason Statham again so soon, having appeared in The Meg as part of 31 Days of Horror this month. This was only his fourth film after hitting it big with Guy Ritchie’s Snatch in the previous year. The film rounds itself out with a group of other familiar faces, including a Carpenter mainstay with Peter Jason as the train driver. Many people come to the film for the chemistry between the characters, but that’s still not enough to elevate the film beyond mediocrity.

Genre-fication

If I had to pick a genre for Ghosts of Mars, science-fiction or horror, I’d definitely go with western. Honestly, the film has more in common with Howard Hawks westerns like Rio Bravo, or the early John Carpenter film Assault on Precinct 13, which itself was inspired by Rio Bravo. Mars is a frontier town in this film. Miners work in a desert-like environment, live in a company town, and get incarcerated into a small town jail. The only real difference is that it happens to be on an alien planet. The Mars Police Force characters are the cavalry or cowboys that are hired to transport a convict from the frontier town (Shining Canyon) to the city (Chryse). They end up gathering more assistants in other criminals and townsfolk. But the similarities don’t stop there. The group of possessed miners functions as Indians to the Mars Police Force’s Cowboys. The self made weapons of spears and arrows (and the occasional saw blade), barbarism, and ritualistic tribalism draw parallels to classic Hollywood Westerns.

But Ghosts of Mars definitely has elements of a sci-fi or horror film (that’s why it’s being reviewed this month. Primarily, it’s set on the planet Mars, an often cited sci-fi location made most popular in the 1950s with titles like Rocketship X-M, Invaders from Mars, Robinson Crusoe on Mars, and the classic The War of the Worlds. The mission for the film holds similarities with Carpenter’s previous Escape from New York. Different types of characters, but similar survival elements. The storyline also makes use of classic tropes in both genres, notably the lone survivor arriving back to civilization to tell their tale. The 1959 film The Angry Red Planet had a similar plot (and took place on Mars), but there’s also Aliens (with Ripley telling her tale from the first film), and pretty much any horror film. Films like Event Horizon and Planet of the Vampires have alien spirits taking over human bodies, sometimes for purposes unknown. Unfortunately, a lot of these elements become secondary to the story, as it is more about the mystery of what happened to the townspeople and why these savages are attacking the train. The horror elements are heightened by the narrative structure which does not tell the story chronologically, but in more of a back and forth style as new truths come from other characters points of view. Yet the entire tale is still told by Ballard, who chooses not to tell the story cohesively. The unknown reasons why the possessed are attacking with their dangerous weapons make for some shocking moments. They may just not be enough to consider this film horrific.

Societal Commentary

As with previous John Carpenter films, a main theme of this film is loss of identity. The ghosts take over an individual and subvert the personality and will of the host, creating an almost zombie-like husk that self maims and seeks destruction of others. Not much time is spent on trying to heal these individuals, since by the time someone realizes another is infected, they probably are already dying. Ballard is the only one shown having been “healed” from the madness that the ghosts create. She is provided one of her pills by Butler, and that psychedelic euphoria, visualized as crashing waves, drives the spirit out of her, never to return. Carpenter creates a ghost-view which is the subjective shot from the infected person or a loose spirit, tinted red with visual distortion, providing that creepy point-of-view of the killer, as seen in so many slasher films. Unfortunately it’s confusing, as so much of the movie is. The main element of the film seems to be about confusing the audience, in the same way the characters are confused. This confusion leads to anxiety, but only on the first viewing.

A slightly unique concept in the film is that Carpenter created the government on Mars to be a matriarchy. That’s rule by women. It explains the mostly female tribunal that Ballard sits in front of, and the fact that Pam Grier’s character, the Commander, is leading the female-heavy squad. However, the fact that women are in charge doesn’t really change anything. It feels like a small “sci-fi” detail put in to make the film seem futuristic or alien, like making grass blue. It’s there for window dressing but doesn’t change any aspect of the story. It can explain why Ballard is in charge, but doesn’t change the fact that Butler is constantly making sexual innuendos towards her in order to get her to sleep with him. After all is said and done, a female led society does no better at fending off the ghost on Mars than would a male society.

The Science in The Fiction

The opening of the film informs audiences that the film takes place 175 years in the future, and that Mars has been 84% terraformed, with an Earth-like atmosphere, and 640,000 colonists. Several conclusions can be drawn from this. First there is interplanetary travel of a kind that supports non-trained travelers. Possibly something akin to airline travel. This would be necessary to get over half a million people to another planet not including all the supplies they would need to create a habitable series of cities. The majority of these people may be miners and support staff for the Martian mines. There are also other jobs seen, including the magistrates, the security personnel, and archeologists like Whitlock who would investigate ancient ruins on the planet.

Googling the question “how long would it take to terraform Mars,” yields the range of 50 years to 100 million years. Not the most precise estimate. Terraforming, or making something more “earth-like,” is still mostly a science-fiction conceit, even though there have been a lot of smart people working real-world numbers to make estimates about how to actually accomplish such a thing. The characters mention that two years ago they needed full-face breathers instead of the small clip-on breathers they now use occasionally. And within 10 years, they say, the air will be like it is on Earth. Assuming “air like on Earth” is a full 100% completed atmosphere of the planet, that means the process thus far has taken close to 50.25 years, assuming a constant progression. This of course does not account for all of the other requirements of terraforming including adding water to the system, ensuring that the temperature of the planet stays within nominal boundaries, and ensuring a thermodynamic equilibrium between the various systems.

The Final Frontier

Carpenter and his editor Paul C. Warschilka create an almost dreamlike state of time passing on the planet. Given that the film is told in a non-linear structure, which already challenges and disorients the audience, the film makes use of dissolves between sequences, and sometimes within a longer scene, which softens the passage of time. Ballard’s story, as she tells it, dissolves into Butler’s story. Some longer sequence of characters walking might dissolve a couple times in order to hide edits that speeds up the characters progress. It is one of the more interesting effects in the film.

Ghosts of Mars is easily in the bottom tier of John Carpenter films. Fans of Carpenter’s work, or film buffs in general, still may find something to enjoy in this film. It has developed a cult following, but not as much as They Live or Escape From New York. Ice Cube and Natasha Henstridge provide a nice rivalry between their equally tough characters. And the supporting cast has some great names in it, like Joanna Cassidy (Blade Runner) or Pam Grier (Foxy Brown). It just would have been nice to see more of them, or see them actually doing something. Viewers’ time might be better spent on any other number of “people investigating strange occurrences on an alien planet” films, several of which will be coming soon as Sci-Fi Saturdays continue into the remainder of the year.

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