Mission to Mars, De Palma's latest movie, is , from many points of
view, a strange and difficult work. Again, De Palma is renovating
his cinema, following new ways and experimenting, as he has always
done, with original and different approaches to filming and vision.
This time, the results can be a serious challenge to audiences, which
may have great difficulties in getting in tune with this abstract
and unforeseeable movie, and even the director's fans may truly be
somewhat puzzled by a work which in many ways is so different from
the previous ones. Critics, on the other hand, ever ready to take
any opportunity to attack De Palma, have chosen this occasion to give
the best of their worst, administering to the film a true campaign
of slating almost as severe as the memorable one which followed to
"Bonfire of the Vanities". With a few commendable exceptions,
as it always happens.
And yet, for those who are not sidetracked by deceptive appearances,
Mission to Mars reveals itself as a work of great purity and beauty,
rigorous and touching, and even if some of the usual features of De
Palma's cinema here are lacking, or anyway are greatly transformed,
it is not difficult to recognize this movie as a very personal and
sincere one, a film which, beyond any intellectual judgement or aesthetic
admiration, deserves first of all to be loved.
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The traditional movie
For De Palma fans, probably, some puzzlement was unavoidable just
from the start, when it was revealed that his new film would be a
science fiction movie, realized for Disney. Although De Palma has
accustomed his followers to the most various surprises, that was certainly
looking as an absolute novelty. Besides, the choice of this project
came after the usual period of uncertainty, and after a series of
other announced projects, among which only one (Ambrose chapel) seemed
to correspond in some way to the general idea of a De Palma movie
(and it was indeed a resumption of an old subject), while the others
(Mr. Hughes, Nazi gold), were themselves apparently atypical and amazing
enough, confirming the director's deep desire to look for new paths.
Each of those projects was eventually abandoned (at least up to now),
and instead Mission to Mars came to be realized. But surprises were
still not to end. It was clear at last that the story was just a classic
science fiction story with new age suggestions, and in addition it
seemed to be a fundamentally optimistic one!
A certain perplexity was therefore justified, and the reactions of
critics and audiences when the movie opened in the United States did
not certainly help to dispel it. On the contrary, critics did nothing
but stressing (and this is a mild euphemism) how the film was extremely
far away from De Palma poetics (the same poetics that the same critics,
strangely, love to attack and deride when it is more overtly recognizable),
how it completely lacked originality, being a trivial imitation of
other movies: not the usual Hitchcock, thank God, but Kubrick this
time, the Kubrick of 2001 (and how ungenerous it seems to rip-off
from a director who has just passed away), and even the mediocre Zemeckis
of Contact. And, again, the accusation that the film was only a commercial
product, and furthermore one badly made (strangely enough, the same
accusation which was often made to Mission Impossible), that the script
was ridicule, that the acting was horrible, that the music score was
awful (poor Morricone!), and so on. And I am only citing the most
common arguments, because some reviews were quite on a level of personal
lynching, or just of charges of complete madness (such as there had
already been, although on a minor tone, for Snake Eyes).
But probably it isn't worthwile to go on being distressed for the
old and at this point incurable gap between De Palma and the most
conventional (and this, too, is a mild euphemism) among critics. Let's
see, instead, what may truly be at the root of all these questions..
At the root there is probably the simple fact that, in Mission to
Mars, De Palma takes to extreme consequences the process of formal
abstraction which is, in some way, the leading theme of all his cinema.
The separation, or rather the conflict, between the “low”
contents of the film, especially the plot, the script and, partially,
the acting, and the “high” contents, that is the filmic,
visual and semantic structure, is here so exasperated that the audience
has to undergo, during the vision of the movie, an absolutely unusual
aesthetic adaptation. First of all, the story is really a traditional
science fiction story with new age suggestions, and therefore one
can like or dislike it, or even be irritated by it, but anyway it
can be said that it is on the whole rather predictable. The script
is quite bare, wavering between an excessive simplicity and autoironic
and parodistic moments, between technologic hints and mysticism, but
anyway it keeps always a strange and generally low tone, a minimalist
mood. The actors are playing their roles very honestly and, in my
opinion, very well, but the roles themselves, too, are very simplified,
quite plain. And finally, just to discuss briefly the “commercial”
side of the movie, it seems that the director puposefully chose to
completely cut down all that is usually expected of such a film: action
is almost totally lacking, the story goes on through big narrative
spots, neglecting many traditional narrative elements (for instance,
the Mars landing is not seen), and if in the first part we can see
some very strong (and wonderful) moments of cinematic suspense in
the best style of De Palma, in the second part the film becomes extremely
static and rarefied. To sum up, in a sense critics are right: if it
is true that Mission Impossible was not a good spy movie, and that
Snake Eyes was not a good political thriller, then it is equally true
that Mission to Mars is not a good science fiction film with New Age
suggestions. With admirable consistency, De Palma, thank God, is going
on doing "wrong" genre films which are, fortunately, great
cinematic works. If there were a sequel to Mission to Mars (and I'm
afraid that it's not very likely) and if John Woo should direct it,
certainly the approach would be different.
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The movie
But what is there, then, behind the movie as it appears? Here, more
than ever, the answer is: there is the movie which is seen, with its
extraordinary visions and its deep tensions, with its piercing beauty
and its desperate optimism, there is the work of one of the greatest
living directors come to a difficult and painful maturity, but still
invigorated by a beginner artist's inspiration, rigour and desire
to change.
Becuase Mission to Mars is, first of all, a film on human condition
and on suffering, and at the same time a supreme process of formal
simplification and abstraction. Here, at last, we have come to a more
familiar context, we who have always loved De Palma's cinema for its
extraordinary inner tension, for its unappeasable view of the world
and of existence. We must be careful, because this film is highly
deceptive in its intimate substance, and even if De Palma himself
has proclaimed that he wanted, just for once, to realize a more optimistic
film, his soul of director and artist worked in the opposite direction,
and this movie is not certainly optimistic at all: it is, indeed,
one of the most excruciating and desperate that he has ever directed,
and so much more because it is trying to be a story whose ending is
open to hope.
Mission to Mars is a purely lyric work about the separation and the
incompleteness inherent in human condition, and although this is certainly
the main theme in the whole work of De Palma, here it is introduced
in a more fundamental and exasperated way, because the terms are totally
simplified and reduced to their essence. De Palma himself, speaking
about comparisons with Kubrick's 2001, points out that his film is
very different, that it is more intimate and human.
Such an intimate and minimalist mood is evident just from the opening
sequence, with the first image of the fake space rocket, and then
the beautiful sequence, again a continuos shot, introducing the characters
in an everyday dimension, significantly contrasting with the exceptionality
of the occasion: a last party before the long-awaited departure towards
Mars. It must be remembered that this is the only sequence in the
film which is set on the earth, and that all the rest of the movie
will take place in an environment of absolute abstraction. So much
more we feel during the whole scene, interspersed as usual with fragments
of meaning casually thrown into the dialogues and the camera shots,
that the solidity of the objects and of the bodies is reassuring and
touching, while the continuous eye of the camera is here less detached
than usual, almost affectionate in its enfolding movements. The connections
among characters, which at this point are just clues, are already
cemented by the circular virtuosity of the point of view, and the
sequence ends with the unobtrusive and simple introduction of the
leading theme of the movie, that is separation.
At the root of the story, indeed, and even more at the root of the
film, there is one single and great primary fracture, barely told
but constantly perceived as the source of all that happens, and it
is a total and irreconcilable separation, that is Jim‘s wife
death. So the the movie’s hero finds himself, just from the beginning,
in the same condition of total loss and incompleteness which is so
typical of the ultimate fate of De Palma characters, robbed of his
double, deprived of a part of himself which embodied enthusiasm and
faith in the chance of bringing back a meaning to reality; and all
these implications are fully established in the very beautiful sequence
in which Jim looks at his wife’s film, embedded in a perfect
"film in film in film" structure which elegantly condenses
endless narrative time, and touchingly epitomized in the factual symbol
of the fake poster from Mars, a further instance of kitsch pseudo-paradise
of desperate utopia, so intensely similar to the poster in Carlito’s
way ending. In a sense, then, this movie starts where all other De
Palma movies usually end, in solitude and defeat. And so it’s
not casual that all the rest of the film takes place in an absolute
environment, where any human consolation is lost, and where man has
to pursue in utter loneliness a journey which is probably vain. If
we are really seeking comparisons to Mission to Mars, the most relevant
refernce is probably Tarkovskji’s Solaris, because while the
russian director is certainly very different from De Palma, still
some fundamental themes may be perceived with striking similarity
in the two movies, and in Solaris, like in Mission to Mars, the abstraction
of physycal spaces, of colours, of solitudes, makes a touching contrast
with the inner presence of the earth, of the touchable things which
may retain a seeming permanence in the ocean of mind.
Because, if separation and suffering are certainly the main theme
in Mission to Mars, another essential element in the movie is external
space, absolute space, exemplified either by sidereal void or by the
planet itself, with its inhuman landscapes, or again, in the end,
in the fundamental planetarium sequence, by the icy micro-representation
of the universe itself. Here we can immediately perceive an important
difference with Kubrick’s 2001, a movie which has been cited
so often in reviews, but whose similarities with De Palma’s film
are mainly superficial and purely descriptive. While indeed in 2001
space, the universe and the sidereal void created an epic and mysterious
background where, in awe and pain, cosmic events were taking place
in which man was only partially an actor, in Mission to Mars, consistently
with what can be found in all of De Palma’s work , the infinite
is only a chilly and aseptic witness of man’s failures, a supreme,
untouchable and far-away object, in which individual stories can only
withstand bewilderment by desperately affirming their unicity. But
such bewilderment is not due to the greatness of a higher reality,
but rather to the infinite loss of meaning. Space, for De Palma, is
arid and confined, an engulfing and icy micro-macrocosm. Space engulfs
the space-ship as the sandy expanses on Mars engulf the pseudo-earth
reconstructed by a last Robinson Crusoe, and as the planetarium engulfs
the memory of proto-humanity's first defeat: with the watchful and
indifferent glance of chaos.
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The visual structure
As usual in De Palma, the opposition between meaning and chaos, between
reconstruction of an order and destruction of the point of view, between
absolute and humanity, immediately takes shape in the visual structure
of the movie. Once we leave the human, but already lacerating, prologue
on earth, where the camera eye danced around a seemingly objective
reality, we are immediately transported, in the spaceship sequence,
into a completely different condition: here objective reality itself
has lost any references, and the point of view survives only as a
human memory, an aesthetic and moral yearning, deprived of any prerogative
of truth. De Palma achieves in this beautiful sequence astonishing
visual and artistic results, using the scientific reality of the lack
of gravity and of the intersection of "local gravities",
reconstructed in the various locations of the ship with completely
unnatural spatial relationships, and he builds for his camera one
of the most exciting paths in his whole work, a circular and winding
journey in a reality where the very feeling of direction has lost
its natural meaning. The result is not only a visually stunning shot,
but also an actual and perfect embodiment of the sense of estrangement
and dissolution of humanity which is constantly implied in the movie,
while at the same time it is a painful aspiration to a new order,
to the elegance of dancing and vision, to the meaning implicit in
any act of observation and in any movement of the eye.
In the following scene the theme of dance as an object of order and
beauty is resumed, and the weightless dancing of Woody and his wife
becomes the embodiment of the deeper motif of reciprocal search, of
the dreadful possibility that the movement of the bodies may equally
imply approach or loss, and that the difference between the two may
indifferently depend on an unfathomable destiny or on chance. And,
obviously, the whole scene is a beautiful premonition of the extraordinary
sequence of Woody's death.
As Ray Sawhill has appropriately emphasized in his exquisite review
of the film, in Mission to Mars we must look for circles and spirals,
and the spiral is the prevailing form, either in the camera movements
or in concrete objects, finally incarnated in the daring and excessive
symbol, casually inspired by the basic "techno-biological"
plot, of DNA: the DNA which epitomizes a chance of existing as human
beings, the potential emergence of a geometric order out of chaos,
of an order apart from the cold configurations of void; the same DNA
which is masterly reconstructed, in a true post-modern visual insight,
by means of coloured candies, and whose echo can be found in the twisted
cables or in a digital animation, in the objects, in the movements
and in the mind, recurring as the ultimate reflection of the frail
meaning behind the survival of all perception and affection, of memory
and belonging.
In a typycal De Palma redundancy, this same relationship between chance
and sign is hinted again, in the second part of the movie, in the
symbol of the “face”, becoming perceptible again through
the “melting” of the sand storm, echoed in the ending part
when the astronaut’s faces finally emerge from the anonymous
dissimulation of the helmets, or once more mirrored in the sequence
where the cybernetic message painfully springs up from the background
noise. The whole movie is interspersed with such images which, with
great simplicity, reflect in a masterly way the same basic subject
of the (re)construction of identity, just as, in a very beautiful
scene in “Phantom of the Paradise”, Swan gives back to the
protagonist, through a series of filters and mechanisms, his own voice,
which emerges at last from the distorted sounds of a deformed face.
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Big and small
But even this absolute confrontation between humanity and universe,
body and void space, assumes in De Palma's vision a strange claustrophobic
connotaion. Space becomes not so much a limitless environment as a
delimited and amorphous dimension, a non-body against which the frail
structured body of man must be measured. One of the main elements
in the movie is indeed the essential ambiguity of what is big and
small, the reduction of dimension to a simple concept inherent in
vision and meaning, as it is suggested just from the beginning in
the mystifying opening shot of the toy space rocket. The body is the
only absolute dimension, the space of existing, a symbol of form and
tension, be it the human body of the hero or the mechanical one of
the ship housing him. The astronaut's journey will not be jeopardized
by the infinity of distances or by the disparity of forces, but rather
by the violation of the bodies (man's and the ship's) brought about
by a small, a tiny meteorite. The blood, which has ever been, in De
Palma, a symbol of the dissolution and melting of consciousness, of
what is inside and, through the fragmentation of the bodily structure,
gets outside, of the mind leaking from its spacial identification,
here has again a leading role, and while the human blood becomes (as
in The Untouchables) a track of information and meaning, the machine's
fuel-blood is building new fragmentations. The wonderful parallel
between the body of flesh and the cybernetic over-body is stressed,
with great elegance, in the scene of the double “reanimation”,
where again the difference between life and death seems to be in the
balance between absolute chance and a desperate will to exist.
Even in the Mars scenes, both at the beginning of the movie and in
the second part, the relationship between the characters and the monochrome
martian landscape is antagonistic and claustrophobic, and the camera
goes on alternating perspectives and visual ambiguities where characters
and machines get lost or emerge in the varying close-ups or long shots,
again absolute contrasts with no visual mediation, while the only
memory of humanity is besieged in a last deformed and rebuilt micro-environment,
the post-modern island of plants and disemboweled machines, wind and
spiral cables, housing the survived “shipwrecked” astronaut.
But the full poetic and visual achievement of this odissey of the
body through spacial dimensions deprived of their meaning can be found
in the perfect "planetarium" scene, which is also a good
evidence that special effects and digital rendering may well become
an apt vehicle of intense aestetic emotions. Here, after the absolute
suspension of the passage through the interior of the face, where
the characters regain their own faces in the finally human atmosphere,
in the comforting air of an environment which, in a very beautiful
contrast, is the purest abstraction of form, the utter white interrupted
only by a black rectangle (once again, it's impossible not to remember
the monochrome zoomings in Solaris), we come at last into a dimension
of total derangement of time and space. Before the eyes of the astronauts,
and above all among their bodies, here comes to life a coldly and
elegantly reconstructed universe, and at the same time, through a
further dimensional plunge of the glance, the memory of a timeless
history. The beauty of this sequence is really difficult to sum up,
the neatness of the planets suspended among gestures, the visual sensation
of the whole universe being at man's feet, the perfect image of fragmentation
and dispersion of the spaceships leaving Mars, the touching run of
life through the frantic morphing of the bodies, in a linear escape
whose end is never seen, while the accelerating transformation of
biological forms conjures up all the mental reality of matter, and
at the same time its eternal frailty.
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Separations
But the most beautiful image of the planetarium sequence incarnates
once again the root theme of the film, that is death and separation.
It's the shot of the surface of Mars which, as a face, quickly dies
and gets chilled, becoming transformed from a living being, so similar
to the earth, to a desert landscape such as we actually know it. Immediately
our vision is reconnected, with complete perfection, to the other
key sequence in the first part of the movie, the one of Woody's death.
In that intense and spectacular scene, indeed, after the repetition,
in a highly dramatic tone, of the dance of love and approach which
this time ends in tragedy rather than in reunion, Woody makes the
final choice, in order to save his wife and prevent her useless sacrifice,
to remove his helmet in the outer space, and his face, exposed to
the fundamental void, gets chilled in a desert memory of death. So,
in the human microcosm as in the macrocosmic universe, the same primordial
rite of destruction and loss, suggested in the beginning of the story
by the absence of Jim's wife, is enacted again and again.
There is also a very beautiful moment, at the end of this sequence,
when Terri finally resolves to invert the direction of her movement
and to go back to the spaceship. Then once again the magic of filmic
vision becomes the substance of meaning and emotion: after the long,
hypnotic scene of suspension and suspense, during which both Woody
and his wife, freely falling towards Mars, have truly been looking
perfectly still, because of the absence of relative motion between
their two bodies and of the huge distance separating them from the
immense surface of the red planet, the abrupt rotation of Terri's
body and the inversion of her motion make suddenly perceptible to
the eye not only the actual change, but also the previous, inexorable
falling, creating a true tearing of the soul which becomes a most
touching symbol of division.
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Meltings
The film's ending is deceptively simple. The mandatory solution of
Jim's departure towards an unknown and unlikely “beyond”,
in spite of its mystic and new-age formalism, with rather definite
esoteric intimations (the spaceship's piercing from the inside the
face's forehead to start its journey), is specially characterized
by intense and pure De Palma connotations. Jim's departure is not
merely a fideistic adventure, but first of all a desperate need to
pursue, to the end, the path of a possible retrieval of one's identity
and inner meaning, in a reality where all meanings are suspended or
dissolved, and all identities are multiplied and split. The final
resolution, then, is not a choice of death, which is only defeat,
nor a transcendental and optimistic security, but rather an unobtrusive
and humble sense of our own incomplete destiny as human beings, of
our powerlessness to realize ourselves other than in suffering and
in the loss of our identity, of a non-choice and un-death serenely
accepted and never declaimed. And supremely consistent with De Palma's
poetics is the image of the water engulfing Jim's body, consecrating
him to a death which does not take place, to a survival which is rather
a mystery and a melting of consciousness, loss of any known or comforting
state, purification but not necessarily catharsis. Water, a strong
and recurrent symbol in De Palma's cinema, encompasses the body to
recall its primary mental and fluid nature, acting as a purified blood,
and in that sense this scene is almost a sublimated double of the
most beautiful sequence in all De Palma's work, the prom sequence
in Carrie ending in the bucket of blood scene. Moreover, the water
in Mission to Mars is finally the rebirth of the water which is lacking
in Snake Eyes, of that lost and purifying ending which has left a
trace of itself only in the script, in the final references to "drowning
in a tunnel underwater".
Breathing underwater, his face out of focus through liquid transparencies,
and for once with a margin of hope in his eyes, the naked De Palma
hero is ready to meet his last escape, piercing older faces and shooting
through the void space which was the background and the witness of
his whole story. But it is significant and beautiful that the last
image, the last vision, with the spaceship swiftly flying away in
an oblique course from the other ship and from the other characters
who are going back to the earth, is still, and coherently, one of
separation.
