John Stanley
With "Mission to Mars"
Give me The Face any day. It's more important
than any UFO report or update on that flying saucer flotilla
over Mexico City. I'd even give up first-run episodes of THE
X-FILES if
I knew there was an in-depth examination of The Face on the Learning
Channel.
Sometimes you gotta have something you really want to believe in, and boy do I want to believe in The Face on Mars, that mound that sure looks like it was created by a crafty intelligence. You know The Face I'm talking about, there on the plain of Cydonia, on the surface of the Red Planet, on that barren, arid world we call Mars. You can see the outline of the head as if it were framed by a headpiece, you can make out the eye sockets, the roundness of the nose, the slit of a mouth, even if half of this singular countenance is obscured by darkness.
Try to sell me a bill of goods that it's nothing more than an oddball land formation. That it's just a lotta natural stuff on the surface of a planet.
Why do I want to believe in something that's been debunked more times than President Clinton's claim that he never had sex with that woman? Because I'm an incurable romantic who also believes in the theory that The Face is there as a cosmic greeting, letting the first astronauts who pass overhead know that there is life throughout the solar system, and if there is life throughout the solar system maybe there's life throughout the galaxy and so on, until you've got the whole Universe exploding with life, even if you can't quite figure out where the Cosmos ends or begins. It's the greatest of all mysteries, and maybe The Face is the key that will unlock the door to ultimate enlightenment. Maybe it's the beginning of everything that we still have to learn because let's face it, Earthlings, we're still living in the Dark Ages. Maybe The Face is the answer to the greatest mystery of all time. Even greater than how many inhabited planets are out there in Carl Sagan's Universe.
But there's a lot of people here on This Island Earth who want you to believe that The Face isn't a face at all but a mound of ground, a rock crock, a fluke of nature, an anomaly, a freakish hunk of Martian outcropping, as God-made as the Universe itself. Like the NASA guy who came out a few years ago and called it "an oddity of light and shading." But believe me, it sure looks like a face in those photographs taken by the Viking spacecraft when it did the fly-by back in 1976. And what about those pyramid-shaped mounds just a few miles away on the Cydonian Plain?
Well, don't get me started on The Face and all the surrounding formations that have become controversial. I'll go on all day about it because I've read the full-length book that examines the phenomenon, Richard Hoagland's "The Monuments of Mars: The City on the Edge of Forever," and I've read all that I could find on the Internet, even the stuff that debunks it and puts it in the category of the Abominable Snowman, Bigfoot and the Roswell Crash.
But I'm not writing about the Face just to show off I know a lot about weird mysteries that surround our planet--what I call "The Invisible World," things that seem to always go on and yet we have no scientific evidence that proves anything. Like ghosts and hauntings and alien abductions and all that Twilight Zone stuff.
No, I'm writing about The Face because I'm really ticked off at Brian De Palma, the movie director who used to emulate Alfred Hitchcock in such movies as "Obsession" and "Sisters."
Call this a Face Off between me and Brian.
I'm ticked off because he opted to show us The Face in his new science-fiction epic, "Mission to Mars." You'd think I'd be happy, discovering that there's at least one film maker with the guts to tell the world that he believes enough in The Face to plop it down into his movie and have the writers design an entire plot around its "meaning."
So why ain't I bouncing with joy? Because The Face,
as visualized by De Palma's special effects "geniuses,"
doesn't even vaguely resemble the image we've come to recognize
through newspaper and magazine photos, and through all those
picture enhancements Hoagland introduced in his mind-boggling
book. Since when should pseudo-science suddenly become science
fiction totally? I'm appalled.
Nope, De Palma opted to throw away the image as it is and give The Face a feminine Egyptian look--an insult to anyone who can see that the real thing is a male face, even at a distance of tens of thousands of miles. And in the movie "she" is smiling yet, as if "she" is the essence of benevolent goodness. Give me a break, Brian baby. The Sphinx has more personality and charm and believability than your version of The Face.
Tampering with such a well-known image and reshaping it for his own design is just the beginning of many things that De Palma allows to go wrong with "Mission to Mars." The movie is a synthesis of so many other fantasty flicks that there doesn't seem to be a single original idea in the script by Jim and John Thomas and Graham Yost. I recognized elements from "The Abyss," "Apollo 13," "Contact" and on and on. (That's what I get for writing a "Creature Features" book, I guess.)
Now I have to be fair to De Palma and say that I'm glad to see him try to make a movie that has an awareness of cosmic issues and that serves as a kind of poor man's "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," stressing the necessity of finding and confirming our place in the Universe for the millennium to come. And all that stuff. Especially since De Palma has made a lot of violent movies filled with sex ("Body Double"), sex ("Dressed to Kill") and sex ("Blow Out"). And let's not forget he's the guy who made "Bonfire of the Vanities," the "Heaven's Gate" of 1990. So you would expect him to atone for his overabundance of past sins sooner or later.
But "Mission to Mars" becomes such a simpering wimp of a movie when De Palma tries to inject the warmth of Spielberg's "E.T." and even steals the look of the "Close Encounters" alien, with a tear falling out of one of its saucer-shaped eyeballs and rolling along its smooth extraterrestrial cheek.
And then there's Gary Sinise, one of the astronauts who decides to freeze a peaceful smile on his face as he discovers the secrets of the Universe and, like Richard Dreyfuss in "Close Encounters," leaves with the aliens, never to return to Earth. It's absolutely embarrassing what this excellent actor has been reduced to in the final scenes. Such a peace-loving look, and it goes on and on, as if somehow De Palma managed to spray smile-freeze all over Sinise's face.
I do gotta compliment De Palma on just one sequence, and it's a whopper that blends superb special effects and suspense, the kind Hitchcock used to give us. At least Brian learned something from watching "North by Northwest" and "Saboteur." And that's the scene where Sinise, Tim Robbins, Connie Nielsen and Jerry O'Connell have to desert their half-destroyed spacecraft and float in their life-support suits through the void until they can reach a passing satellite--the only thing that can save them, or they will burn to death when they fall into Mars' atmosphere. How this is achieved is the one and only thing in this movie that took by breath away a couple of times.
But forget all that, there isn't enough good stuff to vindicate De Palma, no way. Because I think it's time for a really dedicated film maker to re-establish the reputation of The Face, not to malign it and make it seem like an absurd idea. It's bad enough having to argue with brilliant NASA scientists and other level-headed intellectuals who rationalize so articulately that The Face can't possibly exist, that it's totally a figment of my overly fertile imagination.
Let's get the concept back on track because believe me, Earthlings, The Face is there, waiting for us to get close-up photographs. Waiting to answer all our questions about the meaning of life. Maybe The Face, if it's as all-knowing as I hope it is, will even tell us one day why and where Brian De Palma went so wrong making "Mission to Mars."
© 2000 by John Stanley
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