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People have been making movies about Mars for decades, but the real boom in semi-realistic Mars movies started about a decade ago — and ended pretty soon afterward. A spate of movies about Mars, some of which aimed to show the first human exploration of the planet, started around 1999 and stopped in 2002... just before NASA started launching a ton of Mars probes and President Bush talked about sending humans to Mars. What killed the Mars movie?
First of all, here's a brief chronology of the Mars movie boom:
1999: Escape From Mars. A made-for-TV movie from UPN. Five astronauts journey to Mars in the second decade of the 21st century. They must deal with corporate greed and inferior computer components, plus their own demons.
2000: Red Planet. Okay, this one isn't quite as serious. Humanity stars seeding Mars with algae that's supposed to create a breathable atmosphere. But then the algae vanishes, and a team led by Carrie-Ann Moss goes to investigate. It turns out Mars now does have a breathable atmosphere, but it also has evil aliens and a killer robot.
2000: Mission To Mars. This may have been the most serious attempt to date at portraying the real conditions on Mars, based on the images that were available at the time. The first crewed mission to Mars gets lost, but there's one survivor. So Gary Sinise and pals rocket off to Mars, only to run into trouble as well. In the end, they enter a giant white mausoleum with breathable air, and the movie falls apart when they meet a cute alien who tells them that Martians seeded Earth with life:
2000: Mars And Beyond. An early Web series, on the Cyber Sci-Fi Network, Mars And Beyond was written by former Star Trek: The Next Generation producer Herbert Wright, also known as the "father of the Ferengi." (Not something I would brag about.) It's 2014, and a team of astronauts is sent to Mars. Officially, their mission is just to explore, but unofficially they're there to answer the question: "Are we alone?"
Ghosts of Mars (2001). I almost left this one out, because in some ways it's a throwback to the old pulpy Martian movies, and it depicts a Mars that's long been settled, like Total Recall and other earlier movies. Mars has been terraformed, and you can breathe the atmosphere without a spacesuit. At the same time, director John Carpenter did make an effort to depict a semi-realistic Mars, using tons and tons of red food dye to make the gypsum-mine location look Martian enough and trying to make the sets look as though the Martian winds had battered them. Plus he had a local holy man bless the set before filming. That has to count for something. Plus it has Reavers, before Joss Whedon put them in Firefly.
2002: Lost On Mars. This sounds pretty horrific, and I'm determined to hunt down a copy now. The first ever astronauts land on Mars, to investigate a strange energy reading. They discover that Mars once held intelligent life, and then they find a device that sends them spiraling back in time THREE BILLION YEARS to a barbarian empire that once ruled Mars. With, like, swords and things. They get captured by the movie's director, wearing a barbarian costume. And then it veers off into matriarchal Martian barbarian politics. Turns out there's a sequel, and they're both coming out on DVD soon.
2002: Stranded aka Náufragos. A Spanish movie, Stranded stars Vincent Gallo as a member of an expedition that crashes on Mars. It's shot in a documentary-like style and tries to depict the Martian landscape realistically. The humans discover the remains of an ancient Martian civilization, complete with an area that has breathable air. And they find out they can eat the ancient lichens on Mars, allowing them to survive until they can be rescued.
Where did the Mars-movie trend come from in the first place? The fact that NASA was prepping a much-publicized push to send orbiters and rovers to Mars may have helped inspire film-makers. (NASA also sent up some craft during the 90s, but they were lost on arrival. Also, as Moria points out, the 1990s was a high-water mark for Mars novels, including Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars trilogy and Greg Bear's Moving Mars. The development process for the Mars movies of 2000-2001 probably started in the mid-1990s.
So what ended the Mars movie fad? Well, the fact that it was a fad probably had something to do with it. Just like the asteroid-on-course-for-Earth movie fad, this one had to end. But the fact that more real data, and realistic images, were going to start coming back from Mars may have helped as well. The 9/11 attacks, and the start of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, may have changed the focus of movies in development, away from exploration and towards war. (But that probably wouldn't have had an impact until a few years later.) There's also the fact that none of these movies did that well: Mission To Mars, grossing around $68 million in the U.S., may have been the biggest, but Red Planet only made $18 million as compared to its $75 million budget.
Comments
So the Mars movies killed the Mars movie?
I mean, each of these films was awful in its own way.
I think I remeber the UPN one. It ends... Randomly.
Doing Mars realistically is boring, which leads to ancient alien artifacts and time travel, which dumps us into pulp hell. And unless your source material is by ER Burroughs, and you just go for it, naked sword fights and all, it's going to blow.
This is totally off topic, but the UPN movie made me think of this one miniseries that was on in the 80's about a group of children and teens who are sent to be the remnants of humanity or to go find another planet. I can't remember the name because all I remember is my dad calling it The Clearasil Kids go to Space. stupid parents.
@Gyrus:
Is John Carter of Mars in production yet? Who's playing Dejah Thoris?
@Garrison Dean: The Clearasil Kids go to Space *snicker*
@Garrison Dean: Well there was Mission Genesis in the early 90s with Nicole DeBoer. Aired on Nickleodeon and was about how they were all clones manning a ship that was full of other versions of them. Yet they had memories of leaving mars... or something. Long time ago, but I liked it then [when I had no taste].
@Seth L: Pixar has it in development...so that means it doesn't really matter who plays Dejah Thoris...
The heretofore undisclosed bleaching effect of time travel is spectacular.
@aspiringexpatriate: Nah, this would've been network, possibly a Wonderful World of Disney show (checkin on that now). There was no way it was good, but it was on a spaceship which for most of my life was all I needed for me to like it.
AH!! My remembering the Disney bit did it. Earth Star Voyager... Phew, well, putting that 20 year old "did I actually see that or make it up" mystery to bed. Now to find it in its entirety.
+ Watch video
Haha, and one of the "Lone Gunmen" was on it, very young in the opening credits.
I guess you can only do so much with a Mars story now we know the planet to be a cold, lifeless desert with very little atmosphere. Unfortunately, this may be the second of a thousand cuts that kills Science Fiction as we know it.
The first cut was understanding the Moon. With that knowledge, a "world" of fantastic possibilities was dealt a crushing blow. No more "Solarnites", Green women in space bikinis, evil Moon empires bent on Earth conquest or even giant mice. Once we knew that none of this was no longer possible, all that remained was little more than the challenge of man surviving in a hostile environment. That adventure wore thin pretty fast, ending a 50 year legacy of fantastic films and adventures made when on the Moon, anything was possible.
Now the possibilities for "Angry Red Planet" have fallen beneath a similar fate.
The more we learn about our neighbors in space, that same curse follows us, restricting what can be presented as fantastic and possible.
Although the Universe is endless, the laws of nature and physics are not. Sci-fi may ultimately be stifled by the fulfillment and understanding of the vision it seeks to explore.
I feel we are seeing the early "cuts" of Science Fiction's deadly transformation into Science Speculation, based upon too much knowledge to allow for innocent fantasy. Eventually, as we continue to move outward and learn about our Universe, I fear it will become little more than Fiction with cryo-pods.
Sometimes, growing up really sucks.
Fuck. I remember watching "Mission To Mar" in the theatre only to have the film betray my most favoritist planet EVER. Oh no, that made me remember the DOOM movie....ugh. Bastards.
You left out Species II, which opens with a mission to Mars. Synopsis from IMDB.com: "Mykelti Williamson and Justin Lazard are a pair of astronauts who make the first successful manned mission to Mars. Lazard's character gets infected by an alien and slowly begins to mutate. When they get back to Earth all he has on his mind is to have sex with Natasha Henstridge!"
uhhhh (shudder)..."Ghosts of Mars" ... I had blocked that from my memory...
@tezby: Yeah I toyed with including Species II, but it mostly doesn't take place on Mars. What bizarre transformation could possibly make you obsess about having sex with Natasha Henstridge? It's almost unfathomable!
@doctor_cos: Weirdly, I actually really liked GOM.
I think I repressed the memory of seeing Ghosts of Mars.
Total recall was a Martian movie or was that a little to before the timeline?
@doctor_cos: lol you beat me to it
I heard that there are plans to remake Capricorn One, only this time NASA fakes a mission to Mars, instead of the moon.
I thought "Mission to Mars" started out okay -- it certainly looked nice and had a pretty good cast -- but when Tim Robbins died for plot reasons unrelated to physics as we know it, it lost me, and by the end with the mystic Martian... oy.
Another movie I would have walked out on had I not been 30,000 feet up at the time.
I think that what ended the fad was that they were almost all really crappy films. It didn't help that most of them had factual/scientific/logic errors glaringly obvious to an 8th grader.
Probably the best Mars SF film ever made was "Robinson Crusoe on Mars" (1964). It's a bit hokey in places and has some retrospective science problems. But it's still a great film, and it could be remade today with a few tweaks and some rewriting -- and it would be heads and shoulders above all the films listed in the post above.
One other thing (and here's a suggestion for a post here on io9) -- there's some really bizarre terrain on Mars, a lot of which we're still trying to figure out (and I'm not talking about the 'Face on Mars'). A smart screenwriter could weave a great story around some of these. ..bruce..
@Zantor: I don't know dude... last time I checked space is pretty pretty big. I have a feeling that creative people will be able to produce some pretty good make-em-ups as our knowledge expands. I think the fear you have is more that creativity and suspension of disbelief is getting smaller and that is the real problem.
Screw Mars.
We need a Uranus movie fad... Imagine the great movie titles.
Am I the only one that actually liked Red Planet?
"Mars Cliffs Cop" starring Eddie Murphy & Judge Reinhold
@scifipie: "I heard that there are plans to remake Capricorn One, only this time NASA fakes a mission to Mars, instead of the moon."
The original Capricorn One WAS about a fake mission to Mars. That was one of my favorites as a kid.
I'd have to say Red Planet was ok, but the couple of others I've seen off the list are in barfbag territory, especially GOM. I keep threatening my wife with a Mars Movie Marathon as a joke, but she's allergic to Mars movies, and I'm not that cruel.
She does really like Kim Stanley Robinson's "Mars Trilogy", which I thought were pretty awesome, but somewhat dry and way too long. The beauty of the Mars Trilogy however is that it is as realistic as this sort of thing gets. Might be a nice template for future Mars movies. Quality speculation, good drama and... rebels who bring down space elevators.
I don't recall there being any non-lichen aliens at all in Red Planet, much less evil ones. Could be wrong.
As far as Ghosts of Mars, don't knock it too hard. A turd from John Carpenter is better from gold from just about anybody else.
@Belabras: I liked Red Planet. I show my high school biology students the scene where it talks about DNA and its four bases "A, G, C, and P." Ummm... "P"? Okay, so there's adenine, guanine, cytosine, and ... hmmm...I always thought thymine started with a "T." I then go on to justify to my students that a well rounded education is important in any career, even film making.
In spite of several other egregious science errors, I still enjoy the film and like the soundtrack even more. Actually, its one of the few albums, excuse me, CD's I have that keeps returning to my player, even after a decade.
@Chrysla: Didn't you see the film "GAPPACA"?
@Garrison Dean:
God, I hope you are right. But, from the stuff being made today, I really wonder.
Maybe there are some "ET" version of a Roddenberry or Bradbury or Kubrick or Clarke out there, beyond the stars, waiting to start a new franchise. On second thought, Didn't the man say that true Science Fiction is based upon the understanding of the Human experience? Maybe there are still a couple of good tales left to tell.
"Originality: the final frontier!
(Swish!)
Just reading Kim Stanley Robinson's 'Red Planet' at the moment and think it would make a fantastic mini-series, as Robinson understands that character comes first, but still the potential for amazing landscapes space shots and intrigue.
Though a more fun film to make might be CS Lewis's 'Out of the Silent Planet' complete with a teeming Martian jungle, the 'Hrossa' bipedal seals that live in Ewok like villages and the Sorns, giant grey scary aliens, who really don't mean you any harm.
KSR's Mars trilogy ruined the Mar's movie fad for me. I think he was dead on with the true drama of Martian exploration: competing ideologies. Aliens, alien artifacts... those are cool on Mars and all, but they're so much more exciting when there on earth... like the Mars movie that wasn't mentioned, War of the Worlds... those aliens were from Mars!
I think any setting can get old. A lot of authors/writers had to do a Mars book (myself included). Greg Bear's Moving Mars was both realistic and fantastic. Kim Stanley Robison's work is so expository that it can seem like a text book at times. And I think it's the KSR books that just used up the setting until no one cared about it any more. After reading the KSR books you feel like you've been there. But, Mars will be back in vogue before long.
Europa! Bore through the ice to the bottom with a nuclear heated missile! It'll work I tell ya....
We lost interest in Mars when we realized there isn't jack shit there. Just the way we were infatuated with movies about the moon from the 1920s until we got there, and realized there isn't jack shit there either.
Time to move on to something more interesting, like Europa.
Robinson's Red/Blue/Green Planet would be a great trilogy if ever made, but they'd have to whittle it down to just a few of the plot lines that weave through the books (primarily the terraforming issue and those for and against it, and the flood on earth and the run to populate mars). Would probably want to leave out a lot of the Poly-Sci discussions out of it.
Another really great basis for a Mars movie, primarily because it happens to be a great book that includes a very interesting and super unlikely plot element (bubble drives) is John Varley's Red Thunder. Reason I could see this working is because it's for one shorter and less involved than doing a KSR based movie, but it has typical movie fodder, like underdog college students and drunk astronauts that hollywood could gloss over but still not ruin the movie doing it.
"Mission to Mars" was the coffin.
"Ghosts Of Mars" was the nail in it.
I expect what started the mars movie fad was all the BS about the 'Face on Mars'... Once something reaches the cover of Weekly World News it's attained the level where it might be noticed by Hollywood types.
I'm jumping on the bandwagon of the fad being killed by the unremitting suck of the movies themselves.
-Kle.
There was a Mars rover in the early 90s - was it called Sojourner? The little one, that looked kind of like a Tonka truck? I remember looking at the images it sent back with vivid clarity. Pictures from other worlds never get old for me.
@Pouncer: "Pictures from other worlds never get old for me."
Unlike pictures ABOUT other worlds. Theyre all basically the same movie script.There was nothing really unique about them. THATS what killed the mars movie fascination. Next we'll see a movie about a killer asteroid heading to mars to destroy it and mars sends up a crack team of mars miners in space ships equipped with nukes to destroy it.
Basic mars movie plot line: Go to mars. Find alien. Have alien kill people. Kill alien. Roll credits.
Speaking of Mars books that would make great movies, how about Dan Simmons' ILIUM and OLYMPOS? Anyone read them?
A good chunk of the proceedings take place on Mars, but it is insanely surreal, with Mars' transformation into the Olympos of the Greek Gods in the hands of an AI. Although it is a post-human / post singularity story, it's heart is really in the "fantasy of pre-exploration of Mars for real camp scifi" with it's fantastic tale of greek heroes and gods reliving the mythical past of the Iliad on Mars... for real. I can't make this shit up, people!
Needless to say it would have to be a "300" type production, realism be damned, but the great characters and narrative strength of the novels and would hopefully rise way above the digital bedlam.
I still think "Mission to Mars" was a very well written , filmed, and portrayed movie. I'd love to see more movies like that.
@goldfarb: They're going to make it live action. So it actually Does matter who plays her. IIRC they are trying not to make it PG, but I don't remember where I heard that. Anyways, hopefully they get it done for the 100th anniversary of the books.
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