Ghosts of Mars
(John Carpenter, 2001)
2 stars
For months, all of my friends – even the hardcore Carpenter fans who swear by "They Live" – have been telling me that “Ghosts of Mars” sucked. So naturally I went in expecting to hate it. (I planned on writing an extremely negative review – something along the lines of “‘Ghosts of Mars’ made me hate John Carpenter” – just to prove that I don’t like everything he makes.) But I didn't hate it. I liked it. Kinda. Just a little.
Which isn’t the same as thinking that it’s “good” or “well-made,” so don’t go telling people that Daniel Singleton ranks “Ghosts of Mars” as high as a masterpiece like "Halloween," because I don’t. On a technical level, it sucks just as hard as everybody says. The characters are dull, the atmosphere feels cheap, the dialogue only exists to move the plot forward, and the directing is so amateurish, witless and derivative of Carpenter’s earlier movies that I half suspect that the movie was made by a Carpenter wannabe – a drunk fan who thought that “Prince of Darkness’s” plot (demon mist that possesses people) would have been a thousand times cooler if it had “Assault on Precinct 13’s” action (cops and crooks trapped under siege).
For proof, just compare “Ghosts” to the much smarter "Big Trouble in Little China." Both movies “suck,” but where “Big Trouble” used its suckiness to make fun of mindless action movies, “Ghosts” just sucks, plain and simple. There’s no wit. No satire. No edge. There’s humor, but it’s immature and not very funny. (“I’d only fuck you if you were the last man on Earth. But we’re on Mars.”) I understand that Carpenter might have wanted to make a semi-serious action movie, but I also understand that he’s made at least three semi-serious action movies that exploited and made fun of the genre. Why not here?
Still not convinced? Then just ask yourself how someone who made two of the most suspenseful movies that I’ve ever seen (“Halloween” and “The Thing”) could make such an unsuspenseful movie. Seriously, when an “action-thriller” lasts more than 100 minutes, you expect to sit up or hold your breath at least once, but no, that doesn’t happen here. I blame Carpenter: Instead of building suspense the old-fashioned way (threat establishment, followed by escalating conflict*), he just blasts heavy metal rock as loud as possible, as if he expects noise to create tension on its own, or falls back on cheap shock tactics. (I lost count of the number of times something jumped out at us from the side of the frame.)
But I still kinda liked it. (Kinda.) For all its technical badness, the movie has charm; you can tell that Carpenter (or the drunk fan using his name) had fun making it, and that fun went a long way to keeping me entertained enough not to turn it off after thirty minutes. To quote Pauline Kael:
The movie doesn’t have to be great; it can be stupid and empty and you can still have the joy of a good performance, or the joy in just a good line. An actor’s scowl, a small subversive gesture, a dirty remark that someone tosses off with a mock-innocent face, and the world makes a little bit of sense.
If you understand what she means, then maybe you understand why I’m giving “Ghosts of Mars” 2 stars instead of the 1 ½ that it deserves.
*Some critics blamed the lack of tension on Carpenter’s decision to not develop the characters, which made it impossible (they said) for us to care about what happened to them. I disagree. I knew (and cared) just as little about the characters in “The Thing,” but I still held my breath for almost the entire movie.
As Hitchcock said (and Carpenter proved), apprehension of a threat almost always outweighs our feelings toward the characters (so even if we hate the mobsters, we’ll still hold our breaths before the bomb under their table explodes). The big problem with “Ghosts,” therefore, isn’t that Carpenter barely develops the characters; it’s that he barely develops the threat. (That, and the flashback structure lets us know right from the beginning who dies.)
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