Mars on Film: Total Recall (1990)

If you came of age watching sci-fi movies in the 1980s and 1990s, one fact was clear: Arnold Schwarzenegger had rapidly become the genre’s most valuable player.

The actor and future governor went from strength to strength in the form of The Terminator (1984), Predator (1987), The Running Man (1987), Total Recall (1990) and T2 (1991). Rewardingly, he rose to the top of the action star pack by embracing the genre rather than shunning it. 

By contrast, Sylvester Stallone didn’t begin making sci-fi based films (like Demolition Man [1993] and Judge Dredd [1995]) until the early 1990s, and by then, Schwarzenegger had all but cornered the market. 

How did he do it?

In particular, Schwarzenegger seemed to have an authentic knack for picking good projects and good collaborators. Some would call this knack his “business” sense, but that isn’t entirely fair. It’s an artistic sense too.

But the actor also seemed to understand another significant fact: that his presence in a film was only one part of the successful movie equation.

The other piece involved serious science fiction concepts (like time travel), mind-blowing twists, and even embedded social commentary (The Running Man).

Total Recall, Schwarzenegger’s 1990 collaboration with Paul Verhoeven -- the auteur of RoboCop (1987) and Starship Troopers (1997) -- represents perhaps the trickiest and most twist-laden of those efforts, and is something of a high-water mark for the actor, post-Terminator.

Loosely based on Philip K. Dick’s 1966 short-story We Can Remember It for You Wholesale, the film concerns a man who discovers that his whole life is a lie consisting of implanted memories…a lie which places him at the heart of an interplanetary conspiracy to keep the good people of Mars down, and keep cheap, clean air off the market.

Accordingly, Total Recall might be interpreted two competing fashions.

The film either exactly as it appears to be: a straight-forward (though left-leaning…) action/sci-fi film about a near-future fascist state in which profits matter more than people, and one man discovers the truth…and joins the revolution. 

Or the film is about a man suffering from a “schizoid embolism,” -- a psychological breakdown -- living out implanted memories that have no bearing on reality.

In the film, Douglas Quaid (Schwarzenegger) submits to a memory package called an “ego trip” that transforms him, essentially, into an outer space secret agent.

Afterwards, the adventure we witness is, therefore, a psychotic episode.

Indeed, virtually every development in the narrative from the physical appearance of freedom-fighter Melina (Rachel Ticotin), to the map of Mars’ alien pyramid, to the remarkable notion of “blue skies on Mars” appears both in Quaid’s travel agent/ego trip package and in the ensuing adventure.

Ultra-violent and yet ceaselessly entertaining, Total Recall thus plays with reality in a way that would forecast the decade’s big sci-fi action hit, The Matrix (1999), right down to a scene in a hero is implored to swallow a red pill and see reality for what it is. 

I suppose it’s tempting to witness all the blunt-faced, brutal, over-the-top violence of Total Recall and dismiss the movie outright. Yet even the film’s violence fits into Total Recall’s either/or dichotomy, representing a future of over-militarized police, or, contrarily, a world of the imagination where the death of innocent bystanders (as human shields) matters not…because they are just avatars in a fantasy, not real flesh and blood life forms.

“Take a vacation from yourself.”

On Earth, a lowly construction worker named Quaid (Schwarzenegger) dreams of Mars and a mysterious woman (Ticotin) there. He wants to relocate to the Red Planet, but his wife, Lori (Sharon Stone) doesn’t think it is a good idea.  Instead, Quaid goes to REKAL, a company that can implant two-week’s worth of memories into his brain.

Quaid selects the “ego trip” memory package, in which he visits Mars as heroic secret agent.  But something goes wrong during implantation, and Quaid grows confused about reality.  Is he a secret agent, or isn’t he?

Soon, Quaid’s wife, his best friend on the job, and shadowy pursuers all attempt to kill him.

Before long, Quaid learns that he was once Hauser, an agent working for Coohagen (Cox), dictatorial governor of the Federal Mars Colony.  Now, it is up to Quaid to take Hauser’s knowledge and save the people of Mars from Coohagen’s tyranny.

The only way to do that, however, is to create an atmosphere on Mars using an ancient, alien machine hidden in the sealed off pyramid mine….

“That’s a new one: blue sky on Mars.”

The science fiction films of Paul Verhoeven slyly go after the tenets of extreme right wing philosophy (and the Reagan eighties). There are other science fiction films, of course, which attack precepts of the left such as Statism (see: THX-1138) or communes (see: Zardoz) but that’s not the case here.

RoboCop imagines a world in which everything -- even the police force -- is run as a private business or enterprise and corporations run amok, literally stomping on the little guy on the way to shoveling in the profits. 

Meanwhile, Starship Troopers is set in a world of mindless nationalistic propaganda in which nuance and reason can find no purchase in the head of any pretty (male or female) soldier during wartime.

Total Recall is not far afield of these films in terms of its philosophical underpinnings. The future here is one in which corporate logos dominate the landscape, both on Earth and on the Federal Colony on Mars. 

And wall-sized TV screens constantly report biased news stories (coming from the mouths of beautiful women…) about the “terrorists” on Mars who are disrupting the flow of minerals, and therefore both the Northern Bloc’s war effort, and the flow of commerce.

Cohaagen (Ronny Cox) is the governor of Mars and he is responsible for the business practices that sold “cheap domes” on Mars, and turned a whole sub-set of colonists into genetic mutants or freaks.  Cohaagen reveals terrible disdain for them and notes that the “lazy mutants” think they “own the mine,” when of course…he does.

Even worse, Cohaagen charges money for air, a resource that ought to be free to any living being.  He declares martial law and heavily polices Mars so that business is not interrupted by people demanding more liberty. He also makes the people of Mars work for sub-par wages, so that they can’t escape their economic enslavement. 

The mutant nature of the underclass in Total Recall is specifically designed as a visual allegory for ethnic minorities and the poverty-stricken. The word “lazy” as applied to mutants is a code word often adopted by racists.

Quaid joins the revolution of freedom fighters, led by Kuato (Marshall Bell), and activates an alien generator that will provide free air to everyone on Mars. Make no mistake or misreading: this act represents a re-distribution of resources from those in power to those without power.  The whole corrupt system -- built on cheap domes and expensive air -- is brought down by this act or rebellion, and the worker is the one who benefits.

Again, I seek not to litigate the politics of this issue, or to state that I agree or disagree with the movie’s viewpoint.  I only note the many visual and verbal cues in the film support the philosophical framework I diagrammed above, from the surfeit of corporate logos on the city streets, to the propaganda-heavy news reports, to the many shots of poor-families gathered together, choking to death for lack of free air. 

Indeed, Total Recall fits precisely into the world-view one can detect in both RoboCop and Starship Troopers, where wealth and power is concentrated in the hands of the few at the expense of the masses.  The film knowingly refers to Kuato as both a terrorist and a George Washington figure (fighting for liberty and independence), but it is clear where Arnie’s character falls on that spectrum of thinking.  He takes the side of the rebellion, not entrenched authority, and never looks back.

What I find endlessly intriguing about Total Recall, however, is the “mind fuck” or “ego trip” aspects of this work of art.  Quaid goes to Recall (REKAL) and either learns the truth about himself  and his identity (Story A), or slips hopelessly into delusional psychosis and experiences a “free form delusion” (Story B).

If we consider Story B for a moment, it’s amazing to see how much it makes sense in context.

Quaid goes to REKAL and is offered the “Ego Trip” package by the slick salesman there. He shows Quaid a package in which he becomes a “secret agent” operating on Mars. 

When Quaid is about to be implanted with the “Ego Trip”, the doctor shows him some new upgrades to that package. It includes, explicitly, material about alien civilizations on Mars. A screen nearby toggles through imagery of alien beings and architecture. One such image is of the Air-Generator in the Pyramid Mine. 

Indeed, it is exactly that generator, as we see in the last act of the film. 

So ask yourself, how does REKAL have access to the interior of a closed (and guarded) Martian mine, and know about a top-secret machine that could alter forever the balance of power on the Mars Colony? 

The answer is simple, REKAL couldn’t have that info. Instead, it has implanted this imagery in Quaid’s memory. He then experiences a schizoid embolism, and then his mind takes him on a tour of said implanted imagery. The mine is never real. It exists only in the program, and then in Quaid’s schizoid mind.

In the same scene, Quaid is asked to pick a “type” of lover he would like. He says his orientation is “hetero” and the doctors begin programming a woman for him to romance on his ego trip.  She is not just any woman, we see, but the operating room’s screen actually shows footage of Rachel Ticotin’s Melina.

Again, not a lookalike, not a doppelganger, actually her.  And then, after the embolism event, Quaid encounters her.  But she exists not in the real world, only in the program and in his messed up head.

The mitigating evidence here, perhaps, is that the film opens with a dream sequence in which Quaid and Melina are seen walking on the canals of Mars together.  He slips, she screams and tries to help him.  So it is established that he is thinking of Melina -- a mystery woman -- before implantation, and therefore it cannot be a fiction created by the ego trip programmers. 

Yet it is not impossible to believe that Quaid has already been implanted as the movie starts, but has no memory of it. 

In other words, his trip to REKAL is included, actually, in the ego trip and the “secret agent” package. 

Think about it for a moment: a trip to REKAL is the perfect place for a construction worker to determine that he is actually the savior of the solar system. So REKAL might be incorporated as part of Quaid’s movie-long fantasy, which commences not with the trip to the company in the body of the film, but occurs before the opening dream that awakens the inner secret agent.

By the same token, the doctor informs the salesman that she has not yet “implanted” the secret agent portion of the memory program. But, if the entire movie is an implanted memory, her comment means nothing.  It is simply the mind’s way of rebelling against the idea that it is living in a fantasy.  Remember, when Quaid asks if the memories feel real, he is told that his “brain will not know the difference.”  So, to seem real, perhaps he must believe that he was a secret agent all along and REKAL never implanted anything.

In the same implantation scene, a doctor’s assistant looks at the ego-trip architecture and quips. “That’s a new one…blue skies on Mars.” A highly implausible Hollywood happy ending, right?

Yet the film ends, of course, with blue skies on Mars, the end point of the two-week “ego trip” memory implant. 

A second scene, later in the film, finds Dr. Edgemar (Roy Brocksmith) on Mars, attempting to talk Quaid down, because he is having a psychotic break (schizoid embolism). Notice the visual symbolism of this scene. The mise-en-scene is important. 

Quaid is stationed on the left side of the frame, Edgemar in the middle, and a distorted reflection of Quaid (in a mirror) is on the right. This visualization represents the core of the Story B narrative. "Schizoid" means doubling or fragmenting of the mind, and this image shows us two Quaids, attempting to broach reality, with Edgemar as the mediator.

Edgemar tells Quaid that if he doesn’t ingest the red pill, he will lose all touch with reality. He will be a savior one moment, a betrayer the next. This “free form delusion” will even include “fantasies” about an “alien civilization.” 

He’s a villain and a faker in Story A.  But in Story B, every single one of Edgemar’s theories comes true.

Melina finally trusts Quaid, and then learns that he is actually Hauser, working covertly against the rebels.

And, in the end, Quaid countenances the tools in the pyramid mine, artifacts left behind by an alien civilization.

Total Recall plays drolly with this idea that there are parallel tracks at work in the film (Story A/Story B), and ends with a moment of incredible playfulness that honors both possibilities.

Quaid stands under the blue skies of Mars with Melina and says that the whole experience is “like a dream.”  She replies that he should kiss her before he wakes up. 

At this juncture, Jerry Goldsmith’s score goes into a different mode, one that suggests tension and anticipation, as if Quaid is about to wake up.  The ego trip two-week vacation is ending, and real life -- as a construction worker -- is about to come crashing back down on him.  You can’t miss the menacing quality of the soundtrack at this juncture, as if the carpet is about to pulled out from under us.

The self-reflexive aspect of this ending is plain. We -- the audience -- have been “dreaming” with our eyes open for two hours, watching the film. And now, it too is about to end. 

Back to real life!

So Total Recall may merely be a story of revolution against the wealthy and powerful on Mars, or it may be a story of a man undergoing a hallucination because of a trip to the “brain butchers.”  Either way, it is our dream at the cinema, captivating our attention, and finally, ending with a return to reality.

I remember when Total Recall first premiered, many critics complained about the level of violence depicted on screen. There is a scene here of extreme violence worth mentioning. Quaid is pursued through a train station. He goes up an escalator, and runs into a trio of agents. They shoot at him, but miss, hitting another man on the escalator. Quaid uses the man’s corpse as a human shield, and then kills his attackers. Next, he throws the corpse down the escalator, onto Richter (Ironside) and another pursuer. After they all get off the escalator, Richter steps over the bloody corpse of one of his men without a look back.

This is a pretty bracing scene, for certain, and yet it is not gratuitous. In some ways, it is one of the most important scenes in Total Recall. If we are following Story A, this violence is an indication, like the ubiquitous corporate logos, of the overwhelming fascist state. Militarized police kill citizens without warning, without regret, and without legal repercussions. This is Coohagen’s preferred world, where the little people live and die by his whim.

Contrarily, if we follow Story B -- the “ego trip” -- there is no real violence in the scene at all, and part of Quaid’s mind must realize that. The action is a vacation “.fantasy,” like Call of Duty video-game, and the people who get caught in the cross-fire are not real, mere avatars to make it all seem real.

The screen is covered in blood in the film, and this is an intentional thing. Verhoeven even gives us a scene in which chunky rat blood pools on a view-screen, obscuring Quaid's visage.  The screen then turns to the blood red of the Martian surface. This transition could be the trademark inage of the film (and Verhoeven's Story A/Story B parallel approach.)

Total Recall may be an action film on the surface, but it actually carries social commentary (about the dangers of a fascist/corporate-controlled state), navigates carefully and consistently a science fiction premise concerning the nature of reality, and features probably the best cast of all Schwarzenegger’s sci-fi films. 

Ronny Cox is ruthless and terrifying as Coohagen. And Ironside is perfect as Richter, showcasing the idea that menace comes from attitude and screen presence, not from height or muscle mass. And Sharon Stone absolutely steals the first half of the picture, vacillating expertly from “loving wife” mode to “fierce assassin” mode.  She switches back and forth adroitly, sometimes between breaths.  And she is absolutely physically convincing in the fight sequences. 

Only Rachel Ticotin seems a little out of her depth here, as Melina, and that may be intentional too. She is hemmed in by Quaid’s description of his perfect woman: sleazy and demure. There’s not a big range she can travel between those two adjectives. Her role feels like a commentary on female romantic leads in action films.

Witty and wicked, smart and subversive, Total Recall might just qualify, in Quaid’s colorful terminology: “the best mind-fuck yet” in Schwarzenegger’s sci-fi catalog.

Mars on Film: Red Planet (2000)

The years 2000 – 2001 brought movie audiences a handful of films about the (angry) red planet, including Brian De Palma’s Mission to Mars, John Carpenter’s Ghosts of Mars, and Antony Hoffman’s Red Planet. 

Of all those titles, Red Planet is likely the least satisfying work of art. A big-budgeted film featuring a great cast that includes Val Kilmer, Carrie-Ann Moss, and Terence Stamp, the film suffers from poor execution, and, finally, a lack of coherence.

It would be tempting to write that the movie’s heart is in the right place because Red Planet expresses the idea that man will survive by exploring and settling the final frontier, by pursuing new horizons.

But Red Planet also boasts a contradictory anti-science message, one that suggests faith and belief are actually the answers to solving man’s problem. It isn’t my job -- or my place -- to tell anyone what to believe in this regard, only to state that, thematically-speaking, it would have been better for Red Planet to pick one idea and stick with it. Instead, the film raises a debate about science vs. spirituality that is handled superficially at best. The whole approach is…scattershot.

This thematic schizophrenia would be more tolerable and easily reconciled if Red Planet were better paced and the narrative details more compelling. I’ve watched several Mars films of late, and Red Planet, like The Angry Red Planet (1959) and Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964) boasts some scientific errors too.  But both of those (older) films knew clearly what they wanted to be about, and what they had to say about human life and nature.

By contrast, Red Planet is muddled and sadly anti-climactic, unable to enunciate any clear philosophical through-line or point. Much of the film looks great, particularly a dangerous landing on the Mars surface, but other than that, the film possesses very few memorable virtues.

“Maybe life is more mysterious than you think it is.”

In the near-future, Earth can no longer sustain the rapidly-expanding human population. Realizing that the planet will soon die, mankind sends algae to Mars which will produce oxygen and commence the terraforming process prior to colonization.

A ship, Mars-1, heads to the red planet, however, when the air on the planet begins to diminish rather than expand. The mission is captained by Commander Kate Bowman (Carrie-Ann Moss). Others in the crew include engineer Gallagher (Val Kilmer), scientists Chantillas (Terence Stamp) and Burchenal (Tom Sizemore), co-pilot Santen (Benjamin Pratt) and a terraforming expert, Pettengill (Simon Baker).

En route to Mars, the ship is damaged, and Bowman remains on board to conduct repairs while the others attempt a dangerous landing on the Martian rock. 

After making ground-fall, the crew finds that it is being hunted by AMEE, a military robot who has been set to “war” mode inadvertently. Soon, the crew also learns that their habitat -- equipped with food and oxygen -- has been mysteriously destroyed.

With precious little air remaining in their suits, Gallagher and the others must solve the mystery of the algae, evade AMEE, and repair an old Russian launcher that may be the only key to returning to orbit.

“Short time to live. Long time to wait.”

First things first: the makers of Red Planet should be commended for creating a strong, and central female character Kate Bowman. This mission commander is likely named after Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea), of the ill-fated Discovery in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), and Moss is very good in the role.

It’s no exaggeration to note that Red Planet seems to work exponentially better whenever Bowman is on-screen making tough calls, and fighting for her team’s survival, and the success of the mission. Bowman faces some of the same challenges that Sandra Bullock’s character endured in last year’s Gravity (2013), but Red Planet doesn’t saddle the character with a trite personal tragedy to overcome, or one that contextualizes Bowman in terms of a traditional or conventional female role, like being a Mommy instead of being an astronaut.  One of the few things Red Planet gets right, finally, is its depiction of a competent, resourceful commander figure.

Red Planet evidences a strong environmental undercurrent too. The Earth is dying and a terraformed Mars may be the only option for survival if man is to endure into the twenty-second century. I admire the film for noting that man will not last forever if he remains solely on Earth -- whether for reasons of over-population, pollution, or even an asteroid strike -- and that the logical alternative is to seek new homes on neighboring worlds, or in deep space.

In the film, Chantillas (Stamp) puts a fine point on human short-sightedness about the environment. “If we fail,” he says, “everything” (including the works of Shakespeare and the Constitution) was for nothing.

How true.

If humans don’t take better care of the Earth, or make arrangements for the future, then every great artistic achievement is lost to history, and, finally, unimportant. And that, of course, would be a terrible tragedy.

Yet, in the very same scene, Chantillas -- the scientist, and a character described as “the soul” of the crew -- notes that “science can’t answer any of the real interesting questions.”

Since he is a scientist, I wonder how he can make such a claim with a straight face.

Science has brought the team to Mars.

Science has made space travel possible.

Science has seeded Mars with algae, which should (according to the film) make the air breathable.

Science has thus made it possible for man to have a second chance to escape extinction.

Without science, I hasten to add, there would be no chance whatsoever.  Believe in God or not, you simply can’t pray your way to Mars. I don’t mean that facetiously, I mean it in practical, real-life terms. To get to Mars you require specific things, like rocket fuel, computers, trained astronauts, and a competent support net.  All those things arrive from the auspices of knowledge and science.

I suppose it comes down to what, precisely, are Chantillas’s “interesting questions.” 

If by that phrase he is talking about the existence of the human soul, or of the afterlife, he may have a point worth debating, absolutely.

But those topics aren’t under discussion.

What is being discussed in the film is a mission to determine why some algae on Mars is dying, and whether or not the planet will soon be ready to sustain human life. I don’t see how anything other than science can answer those particular questions. Again, you can’t analyze the properties of algae (or alien “nematodes”) through prayer or worship.  You do it with education, with science.

While Red Planet struggles to be profound by musing over “interesting questions” vis-à-vis science and religion, the time would be better spent sharpening the characters. Many suffer from a severe lack of definition. Benjamin Bratt’s character, Santen, for example turns into a complete asshole once on the Martian surface, and his death is depicted so poorly and so suddenly that you wait for the rest of the film for him to re-appear. But he doesn’t.

By the same token, Pettengill is woefully ill-defined. Why does he go nuts? Why does he kill Bratt’s character? Why does he attack the others? 

There is no rhyme or reason for his behavior or paranoia beyond personal mental instability, and though he is a last-minute crew addition, it certainly seems someone would have detected, on the long journey to Mars, that he is a bit off. 

Instead, Pettengill is just a useful -- but baffling -- cog in the screenplay, one that must make certain things (like a murder) happen in a certain order, thus throwing up second and third act obstacles for the landing team.

But if you examine Pettengill’s behavior, there is no reason for him to go bonkers when he does. Why kill the very people who are going to repair the spaceship you need to get home? Or who will solve the mystery of the atmosphere that you need to can breathe?  The human survival instinct would preclude Pettengill’s behavior, even if he is unhinged. Only Gallagher can re-tool the Russian lander. Only Burchenal can understand the mystery of Mars, etc.  Kill them, and you’re killing yourself, essentially.

Unfortunately, much the same argument can be made regarding AMEE, the robot that conveniently gets stuck on “war” mode and attempts to kill Gallagher and co. The robot begins hunting and killing the crew-members, but there is no real rhyme or reason for this plot strand, unless the movie is attempting to note that man, by creating such technology, is actually endangering only himself. 

And again, a movie about man landing on and taming the Red Planet can’t be anti-technology or anti-science to such a degree, can it?  There would be no hope for mankind in the film’s central scenario if he didn’t build spaceships, terra-forming devices, or robots like AMEE. 

And again, Gallagher explicitly survives by re-purposing old (Russian) technology and getting back into orbit.  Bowman survives by knowing how to purge a fire from the belly of Mars-1. 

Science saves them both.

Once more, Red Planet doesn’t seem to know what point it wants to convey. It wants to suggest that life is more mysterious than humans can reckon with (and thus hint at profound or deeply philosophical religious truths), but similarly tries to make the case that man must tame -- via science, knowledge, and technology --other planets to survive.

Robinson Crusoe on Mars and Angry Red Planet certainly had their share of scientific errors, but in fairness to those films, these errors were made before much our fund of knowledge about Mars was complete.  By the time of Red Planet’s release, we had a rover on Mars (which features in the film) and a decent sense of the planet’s qualities.

But Red Planet keeps getting things wrong that we already know. For example, it gets wrong the four letters that describe DNA sequences -- G T A and C -- and wrongly suggests that nematodes are insects rather than worms.  Errors like these may be small, but can take one right out of the film’s reality.

Forget the errors, and forget, even, the muddled message about science vs. religion. Red Planet simply never works up any real sense of tension or momentum. The final battle between AMEE and Gallagher is completely lacking in suspense, or even a true sense of danger. Like every other aspect of the film, the denouement just falls completely flat.

I wanted to love Red Planet when I first saw it. I had high hopes for it. But the film, like poor Mars-1, ultimately, is “dead in the water.”

Mars on Film: The Angry Red Planet (1959)

Unlike Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964), Ib Melchior’s The Angry Red Planet (1959) didn’t earn many positive reviews from critics of its day, or afterwards, either, for that matter. 

The low-budget AIP film was shot in just ten days on a budget of two-hundred thousand dollars and its primary visual gimmick -- a technique called Cinemagic which was to render two-dimensional drawings 3-D in appearance -- never quite worked. The film’s big visual conceit is thus a red filter slathered over all the sequences set on the Martian surface. Commendably, the red tint hides many trespasses, including painted backdrops

Yet in a way, it’s a shame that The Angry Red Planet isn’t more fondly remembered today. The film is very static, and even cramped visually-speaking, it’s true, yet it nonetheless possesses a rich sense of imagination, and its story of a doomed space mission is both mysterious and suspenseful. The narrative twists and turns keep creating new and more menacing challenges for the astronaut characters to face and defeat.  In the end all the pieces fit together nicely into a unified whole; a complete story that makes sense and even proves chilling.

I’ve noted before that I’m a sucker for space mystery/doomed-expedition cinematic stories; adventures in which human astronauts travel to the stars and find terror and awe there. The Angry Red Planet fits right in with that template. The acting is no great shakes, and some of the special effects don’t come off that well, but the film is fast-moving, and maintains the sense of mystery and grandeur that I find so irresistible about these tales.

There be dragons over that next hill. Or across that sea.  Or on that dark plain, just beyond the landing site…

The Angry Red Planet and movies (and TV shows like it…) are thus pioneer tales; stories of man perched on the edge of known territory, venturing out into realms new, mysterious, wondrous and terrifying. Man could meet anyone out there, on that frontier…or anything. The limit of the storytelling is thus, simply, the imagination of the storyteller

The Angry Red Planet veritably bristles with the uncertainty and thrills of a manned landing on Mars, and despite the dated aspects of the film’s visualizations and screenplay, still holds together remarkably well. One scene involving a forty-foot denizen of Mars -- a sort of crab/rat/spider-thing -- still manages to forge a sense of real terror.  Another monster, a giant amoeba, proves almost as disturbing to the psyche.  Regardless of all the film’s deficits in terms of characterizations and visualizations, there is the feel of a legitimate, alien ecosystem broached here, and that vibe works immeasurably in the film’s favor.

How to say this? The Angry Red Planet succeeds almost in spite of itself, and again, I credit the imagination of the screen-writers, Ib Melchoir and Sidney W. Pink, for that quality.

“Mars…the red planet…our destination.”

On Earth, Major General Treager (Paul Hahn) recalls the long-missing MR (Mars Rocket) 1. He orders his men to bring the vehicle back to terra firma via remote control, and land it in the Nevada Desert. 

There, it is soon revealed that only two of the crew, Colon Tom O’Bannion (Gerald Mohr) and Dr. Iris Ryan (Naura Hayden) remain alive. However, O’Bannion has some kind of infectious and deadly growth covering one of his arms.

With the mission tapes mysteriously erased, the traumatized Ryan must recount to Treager and her doctors the story of the landing on Mars if there is any hope to diagnosis and reverse Tom’s grave condition.  She attempts to remember everything, and explains how, after forty-seven days in flight, the rocket touched down on a still, silent Martian surface.

Exploratory teams to the surface discovered strange, man-eating fauna, and weird life-forms, like a giant carnivorous rat-spider, there.  

Soon, the team’s scientist, Professor Gettell (Les Tremayne) realized that the Earth crew was being tested by such challenges and confrontations, and urged the mission to depart for home. Unfortunately, as the crew learned, a force-field was holding their rocket back.

Hoping to find and reason with the intelligence behind that force-field, the four man crew set out via inflatable raft across a Martian ocean. There, the astronauts spotted a magnificent, highly-advanced city, but one guarded by a colossal, hungry amoeba.  Chief Warrant Officer Sam Jacobs (Jack Kruschen) was absorbed and consumed by the amoeba as the others returned safely to the ship. Attempting to save him, Tom’s arm was infected by the green substance.

After electrifying the hull, and repelling the amoeba, the rocket returned to the stars, but not before the Martian intelligence, perhaps a “super intelligent community mind” issued a warning to the crew -- and to all mankind -- about returning to the angry red planet unbidden.

“I wonder if some things are better left unknown.”

The Angry Red Planet reveals its low-budget origins in myriad ways. For example, the opening sequences of the film cut repeatedly to stock-footage of real mission control rooms, a ploy which makes the movie’s small mission control “corner” look all the more pitiful by comparison. This early sequence features shot after shot of technicians turning knobs, moving dials, adjusting head-sets and otherwise working in mission control.

Similarly, all views of the MR-1 in space are…cartoons. The ship is literally animated as it moves through space.

And finally, once the ship has landed on Mars, those 2-D drawings (which were supposed to become 3-D with Cinemagic) are displayed front-and-center. We see a close-up of an alien plant or flower that is clearly just a two-dimensional illustration. And we get a view of Martian landscape (and road?) that similarly fails to convince, let alone impress.

Beyond these obvious deficits, the movie does not vet its story adroitly or artistically in terms of the language of movies, or film grammar. The shots of the rocket interior during landing and lift-off look woefully static and sedate, failing to capture the idea of a desperate escape, or a daring descent into unknown territory. These shots do not suggest movement, velocity, gravity, or much of anything. Similarly, there is no sense of scope on the Martian surface. All the shots are tight and even cramped.

But, from the opposite point of view, these tight shots do convey a sense of claustrophobia, and, perhaps unintentionally, make the action feel more suspenseful. So much is out of our view, out of frame, that danger could appear suddenly from any direction. The film’s leitmotif, that man himself is under the Martian microscope, becomes more pronounced through the compositions which restrict the astronauts’ space in the frame. When they are on a raft in the ocean, for example, the frame does not extend much beyond their conveyance and oars. Everything else exists outside the rectangular screen frame, and therefore suggests a great unknown.

The issues tallied above all suggest significant problems and yet, in the final analysis, the film’s story itself carries the day, and one is drawn in a little at a time, hoping to discover the mystery behind Mars.

In this case, that mystery is one that ties together the carnivorous plant, the giant bat-spider, the amoeba, the erased tapes, and the three-eyed being who noses into view occasionally. They are all part of a secret, carefully engineered agenda.

It’s a neat little conceit, and one that holds up well. As the Earth astronauts explore the surface of the Red Planet -- believing that that they are the ones conducting tests and gathering data -- the Martians are actually collecting data about them, and putting them through a dangerous series of paces. Mankind is under that microscope and he doesn’t realize it.  In fact, he is arrogantly progressing with the idea that he can land on another world, unbidden, and learn all about it.  Call this conceit ironic, or simply a reversal of expectations, but it adds a sinister feel to all the action in The Angry Red Planet.

I have described the visuals that don’t work in the film, mainly the 2-D drawings, the animated rocket footage, and the rocket interior shots during launch and touch-down. But this list does not tell the whole story.  Many images in the film are quite powerfully rendered.

Although the carnivorous plant looks largely lifeless, the bat-spider thing remains impressive and creepy today, in part because the red filter hides the seams in much the same way black-and-white photography would, and in part because of the bone-crunching sound-effects that accompany the creature. This horrible thing has sense of weight and physical presence to it that is hard to deny, and remains very unsettling. The set-up for the creature’s presence is good too. Iris mistakes one of the monster’s bony, crab-legs for a tree trunk and takes a machete to it. The creature suddenly howls in pain, and that tree trunk starts moving…

The amoeba -- which seems to serve as the guardian for the Martian metropolis -- is terrifying too.  

We see the thing chase the crew across the sea, and then devour their inflatable raft. It then eats Sam, consuming him a little at a time, and envelops the MR-1 itself.   The question, of course, is: was it unleashed or released by the Martians to prevent the humans from reaching the city, or was it happenstance that it blocked their path just as they were about to get answers?

That question aside, I can acknowledge this: had I seen The Angry Red Planet at age eight or nine, both the bat-spider-crab and the amoeba would have proven terrible nightmare fodder, and troubled my slumber.  I have no doubt the creatures did just that for the generation that first encountered them in theaters and on TV.

Using these weird monsters as dramatic stepping stone, The Angry Red Planet boasts a powerful structure in the way that danger keeps escalating (from man-eating plant to man-eating rat-spider, to giant, man-eating amoeba), and the scientists don’t realize until too late that they are the ones under a microscope.

The film’s final punctuation arrives in the form of a message for the human race taped by the Martians. The voice informs the humans that they are “spiritual and emotional infants,” and therefore not yet ready for contact with the planet Mars. 

Their words make sense in the film’s framework. Iris faints twice in the course of the story, horrified by the appearance of the alien creatures…and she’s a scientist who should know better!  And Sam doesn’t go anywhere without his sonic gun, taking a kind of glee from the destruction “Cleopatra”—the gun’s name -- causes. Professor Gettell, meanwhile, seems entirely consumed with fear throughout the mission.

The underlying message here could be, indeed, that though man is technologically capable of visiting Mars (or another world), he may not be psychologically ready to do so. His science has grown faster than his wisdom. Beings who faint when confronted with a different form of life, and carry fearsome weapons into first-contact situations, shooting first and asking questions later, don’t belong in the wondrous, Oz-like spires of the Martian city, perhaps.

Like Robinson Crusoe on Mars, The Angry Red Planet features an old-fashioned or out-of-date view of what Mars physically like. Here, the red planet boasts thick vegetation with nervous systems, giant mammalian life-forms, vast cities, and wide oceans. At the very least, the film doesn’t suggest that Mars has a breathable atmosphere.  Still, again like the Pal film, it’s almost better to imagine that The Angry Red Planet is set on some other world, in a nearby solar system, rather than on Mars since the filmmakers get so much (we now know to be) wrong about our cosmic neighbor.

The Angry Red Planet is a cheap, 56-year old “B” movie, for certain, and one with legitimate deficiencies. Yet it occasionally reaches beyond that description -- and beyond the 1950s too, in fact -- to forge imagery of lasting terror and wonder. For that not inconsiderable accomplishment, this Ib Melchior effort probably deserves a bit more love than it has received.

George Pal and Byron Haskin’s Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964) is fifty one years old in 2015 and remains beloved by the generation that grew up with it. By and large, genre critics praised the sci-fi film upon its original theatrical release and soon after, as well.

For example, author and scholar Jeff Rovin termed the film an “excellent and offbeat ride” and a “thoroughly convincing retelling of the classic tale” in A Pictorial History of Science Fiction Films (Citadel Press; 1975, page 131).

And while noting that the film is “not fast-paced,” the authors of Twenty All-Time Great Science Fiction Films observed that Robinson Crusoe on Mars “succeeds…in its ability to evoke a sense of wonder in the minds of its audience at the exploration of a new and different kind of world.”

Furthermore, the same authors wrote that director Haskin accomplished this task by making Mars itself one of the film’s essential or key characters (Arlington House; 1982, page 174).

That last observation is the most trenchant one because Robinson Crusoe on Mars impresses even today on the basis of many of its colorful and dynamic visualizations. Shot in Death Valley and buttressed by some still-impressive matte paintings, the film feels both authentic and vivid in its depiction of a desolate, lonely planetary surface.

At times in the film, the landscape itself feels almost oppressive in its craggy, mountainous appearance, and at other junctures -- such as the discovery of the polar ice caps -- it appears downright wondrous.  The film conveys the idea of not just a single locale, but of an entire, harsh ecosystem, and that’s quite an accomplishment.

In terms of narrative, Robinson Crusoe on Mars succeeds too because it clearly has the literary model -- Daniel Defoe’s 1719 book -- to fall back on, and it needn’t veer too far from that impressive source material.

In fact, by retelling Defoe’s famous story in a “final frontier” setting, the 1964 film suggests some universal qualities about mankind. Specifically, Robinson Crusoe on Mars meditates about both the human desire to survive even when survival is damn near impossible, and about our need for companionship. 

In fact, companionship is right up there with the other essentials to human life -- air, food, and water -- and Robinson Crusoe on Mars does a good job of exploring that powerful notion.

I count Robinson Crusoe as one of my favorite stories of all time, and find that in 2015 Robinson Crusoe on Mars still captures the essence of that classic tale well, even if all the details of life on Mars in the film don’t conform to modern scientific knowledge.

Indeed, this George Pal production remains just the brand of imaginative, colorful sci-fi epic that spurred my fascination with outer space and other worlds in the first place. And in its exploration of companionship as a key “resource” permitting humans to survive in any frontier, Robinson Crusoe on Mars makes a case about man in space that we must not forget.

When at last we travel to the stars, we should go in great numbers, because we will likely find it impossible to thrive there in isolation. As Robinson Crusoe on Mars reminds us, we need each other, whether here on Earth, in darkest space, or on the surface of the red planet.

In the near future, Mars Gravity Probe 1 narrowly avoids a disaster in planetary orbit, specifically a collision with an asteroid.

Unfortunately, the ship cannot hold altitude after altering its trajectory, and the crew must eject from the vessel. 

Kit Draper (Paul Mantee) lands his craft in a crater, scuttling it, and finds that his commanding officer, McReady (Adam West) has died during his landing attempt. The ship’s monkey, Mona (The Woolly Monkey), however, has survived.

With Mona in tow, Draper attempts to solve the problems of human survival on Mars. He finds the atmosphere thin, and therefore breathable only for short durations, and must determine a way to maintain a breathable air supply. With the use of native rocks, he does just that.  Draper’s next problem is locating water on Mars. When Mona doesn’t evidence signs of thirst, Draper decides to investigate her daily routine, and discovers a water source.

Sometime later, Draper sees a ship landing in the distance, and realizes that it is an interstellar craft.  Alien slavers have come to Mars, but one of their slaves -- whom Crusoe names Friday (Victor Lundin) -- escapes from their custody. The two survivors become friends, and set about to evade the aliens for as long as possible.

Draper and Friday make a long trek to the polar ice caps, and there receive a happy transmission from an Earth vessel and rescue ship.

Robinson Crusoe on Mars remembers and translates to the “space age” virtually all of the important story beats of the famous Defoe literary antecedent.

In Robinson Crusoe, as you may recall, the sea-going protagonist escapes a shipwreck, and salvages what he can from it, with only the captain’s dog (and a cat or two) for companions. Crusoe then lives on an inhospitable island alone for some time, dwelling in a cave and growing his own food.

Over the course of his stay on the island, Crusoe becomes more religious, reading the Bible, and ultimately saves a man, whom he names Friday, from cannibals. He eventually converts Friday to Christianity, and together the men leave the island on an English ship.

In Robinson Crusoe on Mars, Kip Draper is marooned on the planet Mars, rather than on an island. He has no humans to keep him company, but rather an animal companion like the captain’s dog: the monkey named Mona.  The alien slavers substitute for the novel’s cannibals, and of course, Crusoe’s Friday is a one-to-one corollary with Draper’s alien friend. The topic of the Divine and religion come up in both stories as well, with Draper quoting Scripture to the alien at times in the film. Finally, the two men are rescued by an Earth ship as the film closes.

Beyond its relocation of narrative points from the Defoe story, Robinson Crusoe on Mars’ strongest interlude occurs shortly before Draper first encounters Friday. He is ensconced in his home cave, at night, and the shadow of a humanoid falls across his transparent-rock cave door. Draper opens the door and suddenly encounters a silent, zombie-like McReady, who refuses to speak to him, or even acknowledge him.

Draper awakens --sleepwalking -- and realizes he has experienced a nightmare. This scene is creepy as hell, from the first appearance of the silhouette (surrounded by weird Martian lighting), to McReady’s unearthly demeanor as Draper desperately tries to make him talk to him. The scene beautifully expresses the absolute terror of Draper’s predicament as the only intelligent being, essentially, on an entire planet. He also, no doubt, feels survivor’s guilt. He lived, and McReady didn’t.

Importantly, this sequence in the film follows those in which the resourceful Draper has licked a number of survival problems. He has learned how to breathe on Mars (using yellow, air-producing rocks) and he has found food and water.

But the problem of companionship is not something he can tackle alone, and his so Draper fears his mind will fall apart, that he will start to lose his grip on sanity. Draper notes that the “hairiest” problem for astronauts is “isolation,” and also makes a special point of describing how for astronaut training he was in an isolation tank for a month to prepare for the hazards of lonely space travel. But, as he says, he knew, at that point, that he would be with people again. At this juncture, there is no certainty. He could live the rest of his days without seeing anyone else. That is a tremendous psychic weight to carry. Thus the movie equates companionship with the survival necessities of air or water, or food.

If the small, intimate scene of McReady’s visitation sells Draper’s terror at being the only living being on Mars (outside of Mona), then the many shots of the astronaut traversing the landscape alone help enormously as well.

In sustained long shot after sustained long shot, we witness Draper making his way from one dead zone to another, from one rocky outcropping to the next. Seen against the land, he looks truly small, truly insignificant.  Some shots see the camera pointed at our eye level (and below) so that we don’t even see the red sky.  Instead, we see a lot of ground.  On one hand, this prevents the need for every shot to be fixed with a Martian skyline in post-production. On the other hand, the effect is that we see just this one tiny figure moving against a sea of rock and sand.  He seems truly lost there.

But impressively, the film’s visuals aren’t boring or repetitive, and don’t sacrifice interest, even considering the desert landscape. There’s one scene set in a grotto or grove, where Draper goes swimming, and the view is magnificently imaginative. 

At another point, Draper and Friday seek to escape the slavers, and head down into a subterranean world, where they must navigate a narrow ledge.

Again, the effects work is stunning, and a reminder of how Hollywood successfully performed “world building” in an age before CGI.  The film’s final visual flourish plays as catharsis and relief. We see Friday and Draper at the polar ice caps, surrounded by cleansing water and immaculate white ice.  They have been delivered from the red, fiery Hell of Mars’ surface.  This is a great note to go out on.

Robinson Crusoe on Mars also features, perhaps to its detriment, a strong colonial tone. Almost immediately after meeting Friday, Crusoe assumes his superiority over his new friend and tells him that he is the boss, demands that Friday learn English, and attempts to convert him to his own religion.  In 1964, this attitude would not have been questioned, but today it seems as dated as the portrayal of Mars’ atmosphere as breathable by humans.  

Later films of this type, like Enemy Mine (1985), go out of their way to suggest that representatives of different cultures have much to teach each other, but here a lot of the teaching is one way: Draper to Friday. In fairness, however, this was also the nature of the Defoe literary work. It concerned a "civilized" Englishman sharing his culture (and breeding) with a savage.

It is not fair, perhaps, nor entirely appropriate, to judge a film made fifty years ago on the basis of knowledge we possess today, but if Robinson Crusoe on Mars is judged not to pass muster by some viewers today, it is likely because the film doesn’t conform to our 21^st century fund of knowledge about the red planet.  

To put this another way, film lovers and science fiction lovers can and will look past this particular deficit, and judge the film accordingly, based on its historical context. But there will be some viewers who can’t do that, and who will be put off by Robinson Crusoe on Mars’ flights of fancy about a Mars consisting of subterranean water pools, ample (purple) vegetation, and a breathable atmosphere.  Today in September 2015 -- we know that part of this depiction may actually be accurate! On Monday, NASA announced that there are flowing, salt-water streams on Mars, so perhaps in this one regard the film is ahead of its time.

The film’s re-use of some stock props and miniatures, such as the costumes from Destination: Moon (1950) and the Martian war machines from War of the Worlds (1953) -- as well as some oft-repeated footage of those alien ships -- may prove more legitimately disturbing to some fans than do these scientific errors.  The alien slaver ships are seen, in particular, in the same three or four shots, and these shots are repeated over and over again. For a film that features such lush visuals in other arenas, the sort of cheap-jack depiction of the slavers is doubly disappointing. 

These points diminish Robinson Crusoe on Mars significantly, but they do suggest how far ahead of their time later works, like 1968’s 2001: A Space Odyssey were by comparison. In some ways, the Pal film feels like the last gasp of a 1950s version of outer space, while Kubrick’s film (followed by efforts like Moon Zero Two and Journey to the Far Side of the Sun) feel much more modern. 

Yet what doesn’t age Robinson Crusoe on Mars -- and indeed what renders it relevant fifty years later -- is its focus on the human equation, and its message that friendship is as nourishing -- and as necessary -- to the human animal as oxygen, or fresh water.