Mars Attacks
By Chandra Palermo
A shy teenager and her friends are stalked by a psycho killer. A convict is offered his freedom in exchange for rescuing the President from the prison colony of Manhattan. An alien poses as a woman's late husband to evade his pursuers and enlist her aid in reaching a rendezvous point. A group of scientists at an Antarctic outpost is terrorized by a mutating alien organism. Although the settings and circumstances surrounding characters in John Carpenter's films may change, his underlying themes stay consistent. Fans can always expect an antihero of sorts struggling against some malevolent force and many times joining forces with other outsiders against the common enemy. His latest project, JOHN CARPENTER'S GHOSTS OF MARS follows suit.
The film is set 174 years into the future when man has finally mad the jump to Mars in an attempt to find a habitable alternative to the overpopulated Earth. Colonizers have long been mining the planet for its natural resources and searching for any signs of prior civilization. Unfortunately, one mining colony actually uncovers such a sign, unleashing the ghosts of ancient Martian warriors in the process. And the Martians are quite ticked off to find Earthlings taking over their planet.
Meanwhile, Lt. Melanie Ballard (Natasha Henstridge) of the Martian Police Force is on assignment to bring notorious criminal James "Desolation" Williams (Ice Cube) to justice. Williams, insistent that he's innocent, makes Ballard's job an especially difficult one, until he's forced to team up with Ballard and her colleagues in the face of the Martian threat.
"So you end up with a siege movie, kind of like a cross between THE WILD BUNCH and ZULU on Mars," producer Sandy King quips. "The Martian warriors come out, they give us lots of reasons why it's called the angry red planet, and our antiheroes - as usual in a Carpenter film - are forced to band together to survive. It's very traditional Carpenter - the outsiders banding together against the outside force. We started out to make GUNSMOKE on Mars, and it turned into a LONGEST DAY on Mars. It's very much a war movie. And he shot a wider scope than before. It's a big [movie]."
To fulfill the needs of the film's large scope, a 55-acre location in New Mexico was outfitted with biodegradable vegetable dye. Everything in sight, from canyons to mountains to roadways, took on a deep Martian-red hue. On top of this setting, the crew built a town and railway from scratch. Creating their own unique look for the Martian community was a high priority.
To this end, rather than trying to duplicate NASA photos, King says she and Carpenter worked with the production design team to create their own vision for the Martian frontier. "We really just wanted something that looked cool and looked like it might be real," she explains. "It was a matter of trying to find what a frontier would look like 174 years from now and how do we not make it look like we went to old Tuscon or anyplace else."
Although King describes GHOSTS OF MARS as a thriller/war film with a dark sensibility, she says it's not intended to be heavy or dense on tone or feel. She hopes eople have fun with it.
"There is a lot of humor in this [movie]," King says. "It's a hard movie, it's not a little kid movie, but there's that real dark sense of irony. You figure that most of the people who go to Mars even in the future, it's gonna be like the equivalent of the 'Nam helicopter pilots - they're all a little off to ever go there. So, you have a real motley crew with interesting perspectives on life.
"I think it's a really good popcorn movie," King continues. "That's kind of all we really set out to do - make a good popcorn movie and show everybody a good time. And if we do that, we'll have succeeded."
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