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The Red and the BlackDe Palma combines trigonometric genius and Spielbergian corniness in Mission to Mars.

By David Edelstein
Posted Friday, March 10, 2000, at 9:30 PM ET

Mission to Mars
Directed by Brian De Palma
Buena Vista

Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai
Directed by Jim Jarmusch
Artisan Entertainment

A scene from Mission to Mars

In Mission to Mars, directed by Brian De Palma, an astronaut (Tim Robbins) drifts over the red planet—actually orange with greenish streaks, like a faded tartan—and says, "Hello, beautiful." That's what I felt like saying to the movie, one of the sleekest space operas ever made. But I'd have to add, unchivalrously, "Too bad you're such an airhead."

OK, the picture isn't that vacuous. It's just a letdown. The prospect of De Palma—the spatial-temporal wizard of modern suspense—on Mars made me feel like a 6-year-old waiting for the latest chapter of Flash Gordon. But Mission to Mars isn't popcorn sci-fi. It's square, stately, technobabble sci-fi with religioso undertones, and the closer it gets to its climactic revelation, the cornier and more Spielbergian it gets. De Palma—to his credit—doesn't have the touch for woozy astro-uplift. He's a wizard techie with a streak of flamboyant sadism; he'd sooner blow E.T. to bits than send him soaring heavenward. He does gorgeous work, but in Mission to Mars he's only going through the motions.

At least his designs (or more precisely, those of Ed Verreaux) are sharp and clean, with a Deco elegance. This Mars is a desert with its surfaces blown satin-smooth, and De Palma lulls you with wide vistas and David Lean-like tempos. Then he delivers a killer first catastrophe. When U.S. and Russian explorers, led by Don Cheadle, attempt to X-ray a subterranean metal slab, they inadvertently summon up—well, it's hard to say what it is. Let's call it a nebulous, sandwormy demon the size of a mountain with a gaping maw that sucks one guy in and spins him around so fast he flies apart. The nightmare ghastliness doesn't gibe with the movie's later, beatific visions: De Palma and his designers must have gotten so carried away with their bad-alien apocalypse that they forgot where their story was heading. But what a cool opening!

The rest of the picture focuses on the stalwart rescue team. Gary Sinise is in mourning for his wife and fellow astronaut, whose death kept him off the initial Mars mission. Now he begs his commander (Armin Mueller-Stahl) for a chance to recover what's left of his mates. "Give me a plan by o eight hundred tomorrow," says Mueller-Stahl. "You'll have it by o six hundred," says Sinise pithily. In his cabin, he watches videos of his dead wife (Kim Delaney), who reminds him that humans are meant to "stand on one world and reach out to the next one." This prepares you for the idea that, dismembering sandworm demons notwithstanding, whatever's on Mars has a mystical agenda: "Life reaches out to life," explains the wife lifelessly.

Best to talk about technique. De Palma is a bravura problem-solver, which is why he connects with these stolid, Right Stuff-style astronauts at all. He's peerless at juggling four or five climaxes at once. In one sequence, the rescue team (Robbins, Sinise, Connie Nielsen, and Jerry O'Connell) tries to keep oxygen from getting sucked out of the capsule: Robbins bounces around in space plugging holes while Sinise labors to keep the cabin from depressurizing while O'Connell crashes and reboots the computer. Not even Hitchcock had such a blast with the higher mathematics of suspense. There's a trigonometric genius in De Palma's later work: Look at the sinuous tracking shots in Snake Eyes (1998) or the angle of the escalator in the Grand Central Station shootout in Carlito's Way (1993). In Mission to Mars, De Palma has another nifty spatial variable: zero gravity, which means Stephen H. Burum's camera can travel horizontally while the actors bob all over the frame and the walls revolve. The spinning capsule (which looks, from the outside, like a coffee-plunger-pot) is the setting for a romantic pas de deux between Robbins and Nielsen that's one of the most lyrical space scenes ever filmed. Too bad the story brings De Palma crashing down to Earth. I mean Mars.

Forest Whitaker in Ghost Dog

In Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, it's fun to watch the maverick indie director Jim Jarmusch craft a Zen version of the sort of Grade-Z vigilante melodramas that show up on HBO at 3 in the morning. Would you have imagined a Jarmusch picture about a lone hit man (Forest Whitaker) who does a contract killing for the mob, which then capriciously takes out a contract on him? Or a Jarmusch climax in which the protagonist strolls into the Mafia kingpin's mansion and blows away a horde of gangsters with mechanical, Steven Seagal-like precision? What a goof!

This being Jarmusch, the action is intercut with shots of mystical pigeons and tricked out with solemn quotations from Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai (superimposed on the screen). The samurai manual teaches Ghost Dog (Whitaker) to regard himself as a dead man and the world as a dream—which makes him the descendant of William Blake (Johnny Depp), the reluctant gunfighter mystic of Jarmusch's hallucinatory Dead Man (1995). Ghost Dog is nowhere near as original as Dead Man—the most daring counterculture Western since McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971) and a resounding commercial flop. But it has its moments. It has an arresting hip-hop score (by RZA of Wu-Tang Clan) that miraculously connects—and reinforces—the hero's vaporous relationship to the material world. And Whitaker, with those hooded, cloudy, misaligned eyes, makes Ghost Dog as soulful in his impassivity as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein monster.

The problem is that Jarmusch panders to his left-wing art-house audience the same way Clint Eastwood panders to his right-wing audience. The African-American hero is meant to be a pure, noble warrior in spite of the fact that he lives by murdering unarmed men. It's easy to overlook that fact, though, since the only men he kills on screen are representatives of the vicious white patriarchy. Ghost Dog is largely a meditation on the death throes of that enfeebled ruling class. The Italian gangsters are either skeletal (Henry Silva, as the boss) or grotesquely obese, and they're broke, too—hounded by creditors and living in houses that carry "For Sale" signs. (The real-estate company is called Alighieri Properties.) Still, there's enough life in their arthritic bones to mow down innocent African-American bird-keepers and female cops and other threats to their dying white-male hold. Jarmusch can't contain his hatred. He throws in a sequence in which Ghost Dog encounters a pair of cretinous hunters toting a dead bear—just so the hero can invoke Native American lore and shoot two white people on principle. At the end, a little African-American girl fingers his big gun and his samurai manual. Am I the only one who finds the substance of this movie repulsive?

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David Edelstein is Slate's film critic. You can read his reviews in "Reel Time" and in "Movies." He can be contacted at .
Stills from the Everett Collection.
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Highlights from The Fray:


Like David Edelstein, I had high hopes for Mission to Mars. But I also had great doubts, since most Hollywood science fiction is so bad. I enjoyed the movie. It is one of maybe a dozen Hollywood SF films that try to be scientifically accurate. Not every Hollywood SF film has to be a blockbuster. There is room for intelligent space adventure with good special effects.

Note to Edelstein: you say, "The nightmare ghastliness doesn't gibe with the movie's later, beatific visions". The point is that unlike Spielberg's aliens, these aliens are only nice to those who share their selfish genes...and can prove it.

--Rick Norwood

(To reply, click here.)


To Rick Norwood: Dunno... I liked the movie more than probably 99% of my colleagues (or the audience I saw it with, which booed), but I still don't understand how that thingummy with the moist tears and sweet smile and nifty holographic slide show could also have unleashed the dismembering worm demon on people who didn't even know they were being posed a question. Seems a tad... extreme. They could maybe have just not said anything. Or they could have said, "Go away, you English pig-dogs... you kiii..nnnnniggets..." etc.

--David Edelstein

(To reply, click here.)


 The only way you can find Ghost Dog repulsive is if you take the movie literally. How can you speak so highly of Dead Man and then be down on Ghost Dog? They are quite similar. Both are structured as a hero's journey (Dead Man is more of a physical one and Ghost Dog is more mental) and both deal with fate and the honor of dying for a cause. Ghost Dog is as steeped in Eastern philosophy as it is in the various literary and cinematic references it projects with the added kicker of hip-hop and African-American influences. What's repulsive about that? Perhaps it's the fact that the little girl in the end is seen reading the Hagakure. But she is not reading it as a manual to kill, she is learning a way of life and a code of honor. I shouldn't have to be the one to tell you David that you should look at the movie's theme, not the plot to figure out what it's about.

--Matt Langdon

(To reply, click here.)


To Matt Langdon: I respectfully differ. The protagonist of Ghost Dog is a hit man, someone who kills unarmed human beings for money. I object to the conceit of such a man being an existential hero on principle--and I don't care if the film is by Jarmusch or Eastwood or is played for laughs as in The Whole Nine Yards. He is an impassive murderer, period. The situation in Dead Man is different, as is the treatment of violence. In that film, the Buster-Keatonesque Depp is a victim forced to run for his life, and the violence is portrayed as sad, absurdist, horrible--not laudable or righteous. It's true that both films have a strong anti-white-patriarchal stance, but the situation in Dead Man has much more historical resonance, and it isn't tricked out with all that samurai nonsense.

I appreciate your tone--and call me literal-minded if you want--but a movie's narrative is a pretty good place to look for its meanings. And the little girl at the end gets the gun along with the manual.

--David Edelstein

(To reply, click here.)

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