Ghosts of Mars (2001)

 

Director: John Carpenter

Screenplay: John Carpenter & Larry Sulkis

Cast: Natasha Henstridge as Lieutenant Melanie Ballard; Ice Cube as James "Desolation" Williams; Jason Statham as Sergeant Jericho Butler; Clea DuVall as Officer Bashira Kincaid; Pam Grier as Commander Helena Braddock; Joanna Cassidy as Dr. Arlene Whitlock; Richard Cetrone as Big Daddy Mars; Liam Waite as Officer Michael Descanso; Duane Davis as "Uno" Williams; Lobo Sebastian as "Dos"; Rodney A. Grant as "Tres"

Canon Fodder

 

Ghosts of Mars was just okay. That really is not a good place to put oneself in a review, but for what was once a loathed film for me from John Carpenter, that pretty much is the perfect irony when returning to this. This was not even with the loaded issue for other viewers of the weight of his legacy against his later films before he retired and became fully a touring musician. It is deemed that John Carpenter’s career ended on much weaker films, and sadly that is a concept which I have heard with the legacies of a few big names. It seems absurd, and the argument that directors as they get older lose their spark misses context, when some get better and more interesting the less “popular” they are, and when you have a case like Portuguese filmmaker Manoel de Oliveira was getting critical acclaim when he was making films past a hundred years old. With Ghosts of Mars, it feels less like a film of an older director losing his style; in fact, if this came from a young director in their twenties, it feels like the film that catches attention with hope that they capitalize on the style they have and add more personal voice to the later films. That is the real irony here, as Ghosts of Mars is sound in scope, with ambitious aspects, but the presentation is conventional at times to the point it lacked something, which could be found from anyone of any age.

The setting is a tantalizing one, with this one tiny story within it even if with grander concerns. Mars is colonized, and unfortunately, an entity of its past are possessing the settlers in isolated colonies, turning them into husks to be controlled and kill those not taken over. A Martian police unit has been sent to pick up a criminal, James "Desolation" Williams (Ice Cube), from a jail in a mining colony. In attempting to collect Williams, the group find themselves within a colony where no one is around, until they find the headless bodies strung up and survivors turned into a horde of killers responsible for this. The tone of this, including that their only form of escape from these killers is a giant space railway train, evokes the western genre in an outer space setting. We never got a western from John Carpenter despite the fact he has always been open in his admiration for them and inspired by them. One of the most obvious examples is how the premise of Rio Bravo (1959) inspiring Assault on Precinct 13 (1976), and this is important as that is an earlier Carpenter film evoked in Ghosts of Mars as the police and Williams find themselves trapped in a place of head hunters.

The one thing which has not aged well – in a film where the practical art design is juggled with working with CGI, for a film from the early 2000s with a soundtrack by Carpenter full of heavy metal riffs – is actually that parallel to old western films. Space westerns as a concept allow the idea, through a new frontier that is uncharted, to explore the issues of the western, allow us to reflect on the past. One of the most loaded of these is colonization of land, especially as the American Wild West is set in the context that land actually belonged to the many tribes of Native Americans. Ghost of Mars never explicitly refers to this, but by accident the film is riffing on the idea of this, which is not good by mistake as these titular ghosts, literal as we learn of who they are, are psychopaths who disfigure their hosts with body piercings, wearing victims’ faces and collect their severed heads on pikes. It is a dicey position to deal with themes of white colonization in horror with plot tropes like this, even when the colonialists are to also be criticized or even if all of this is unintentional. There is a reason why S. Craig Zahler, when he made an actual horror western with Bone Tomahawk (2015) went out of his way with the script to distance ideas to avoid this, with an actual Native American character on the leads’ side, as they are about to enter the hostile lands of a cannibal tribe, openly dismisses the “troglodytes” as they are called as being nothing like an indigenous American tribe but simply monstrous, and even that film still got called out by some reviewers as racist. You cannot really nod to themes of outsiders fighting the hostile forces of uncharted landscapes without bringing up uncomfortable colonial issues, or racial stereotypes, and Ghosts of Mars even when dealing with hostile Martian ghosts unfortunately falls into this.

Everything else about Ghosts of Mars beyond this is just okay, entertaining but just not at the batting average expected from John Carpenter, which becomes the curse for any creator who manages to string a series of legacy defining works, more so when just one of them would have been enough to cement a legacy, but Carpenter managed multiple in a row. That is the issue, that his highs were so big, even the less regarded ones, or under seen, like Christine (1983) appear with hindsight to be better than most. The issue here is that we are just missing that one twist in the plot, missing that one turn or shock of his style of the films before to stick out. The whit is still there, and actually this is jokier even if the nastiness of the threat is here. In the downtime, whilst some of the nods to the female cast being gay are crassly put, there is a fascinating nod I completely missed in my youth to the setting being a matriarchal colony. It is merely the backdrop, causing one to wish this film had been more a success and Carpenter could have made another film in this world, as it provokes a fascinating turn on gender politics without needing to be the central concern. At a period where Mars’ colonization has been dealt with in areas like the lack of breathable oxygen but is still early days, we have already set up that the figures in high power of women, that is never explained aside from the fact that, barring Ice Cube as the anti-hero, our lead is Natasha Henstridge, allowing her a good meaty role as a result of this. Men are still here, including a baby Jason Statham before his career grew, but the women are in charge, with Pam Grier as the head of the police group, and the script making jokes the explicitly cut down to size macho bullshit, even accidentally cutting their own thumb off whilst high at one point, in the downtime. Whilst Statham plays his character as a horn dog who tries too hard to proposition to Henstridge multiple times, his is one of the only male characters with Ice Cube’s "Desolation" Williams to be reliable, the most comedy coming from William’s supposed savors from jail, his brother and his two colleagues, who become the butt of most of these jokes. Cube himself, doing better than Busta Rhymes infamously in Halloween: Resurrection (2002) as a hip hop star in a genre film at this point, is stiff at first, too much attempt to make him edgy and cool, and thankfully he is able to get to the point of standing out when he and Henstridge just get to play a buddy cop duo role stuck in this hellish scenario.

The aesthetic also stands out. The practical effects are still visible, in the production design juggling the aesthetics of the western genre with science fiction on a lower scale genre film, working around ways to depict details like the giant tank-like train, a symbol from western iconography, which still work and have their own distinct sheen. There is a sense of cool pulp sci-fi in the Millennium, and it feels closer to this new century and decade than a film washing over in aesthetics from the nineties either. The music is also strong for me, in mind that there is now a greater emphasis on chugging metal riffs, prominently involving the thrash metal band Anthrax but also including guitarists of note like Steve Vai, Buckethead and Nine Inch Nail’s Robin Finck. It feels less nu metal, as the time frame have shown to have been prevalent, but feeling part of what was to become the “New Wave of American Heavy Metal” that fully formed in 2005 onwards if in context of a John Carpenter score. Some may find it inappropriate, but for me it befits the aesthetic of the entire film, which is strong in itself. With the isolation of the red earth of the setting, all the colonial town setting has lo-fi science fiction aesthetics, with steel grey and heavy looking vehicles, heavy looking guns, and the costumes either suggesting struggling on in life or the uniforms of officers designed more for practicality in this environment. The world does breath into life in the little details.

It is just a shame that the film is missing just the last little thing to get it over, the iconic aspect that a lot of Carpenter’s most well appreciated films had. This was also the film, until Carpenter’s final theatrical work The Ward (2010), we were left with as it did not do well at the box office at all. It is, in its own context, a good as a solid genre film, even in spite of issues raised by accident with the narrative. It is just a shame that this is missing that one diversion away from an A-to-B plot, which made Carpenter’s films from his golden era stand out, something which could have made this more of a highlight within the filmography.