/ 1 June 2000

Red planet Hollywood

The first man on Mars is marooned when his landing party is zapped in a mysterious dust storm. In response to a garbled SOS, a rescue mission that includes a husband-and-wife team is dispatched to save our hero. Such is the premise for Disney’s epic space-capade opening Friday, Mission to Mars. It is also, as it happens, the set-up for a 1958 B picture called It! The Terror From Beyond Space.

Expect further recycling: more missions to our neighbouring orb are on the launch pad. Warners’ The Red Planet (starring Val Kilmer) follows soon, and James Cameron is working on an Imax 3D project. Two other features – Mars and Beyond, and John Carpenter’s Ghosts of Mars – are also in production.

Ever since Georges Méliès blasted his Rocket to the Moon in 1902, movies have been concerned with the question of (to quote Ming the Merciless) “hurling our bodies into the void”. This according to Tom Jacobson, the on-the-defensive producer of Mission to Mars, is “because it’s the next frontier. It’s why the western was so popular. It represents the best, the most heroic and the most challenging in human nature.”

It comes as a blessed relief that, after a cluster of asteroid movies (Armageddon; Deep Impact), film-makers are touching down again on that forgotten favourite, the Red Planet – once Earth’s greatest bogey, but last glimpsed as an uninspiring mining colony preoccupying Arnold Schwarzenegger in Total Recall.

At one time Mars was the only place a self-respecting alien would lay his slimy hat (spoofed so marvellously by Tim Burton in Mars Attacks!). So much so that “Martian” and “alien” were virtually interchangeable: the “little green men” gleefully levelling our capital cities throughout the 1950s as prelude to invasion. “Across the gulf of space on the planet Mars, intellects vast and cold and unsympathetic regarded our Earth with envious eyes, slowly and surely drawing their plans against us,” warned the narrator of 1953’s War of the Worlds.

From 1951’s Flying Disc Men from Mars, Invaders from Mars (1953), Conquest of Space (1954) and The Angry Red Planet (1959) to Quatermass and the Pit (1967), scores of films have been devoted to our space nemesis. Being red and all, Mars was also conveniently emblematic of communism. Nowhere is this more evident than in Red Planet Mars, in which, after receiving cryptic broadcast messages from our closest rock, Jehovah himself addresses Earth over the radio (“You have denied God’s words and worshipped false gods”), precipitating the collapse of the atheistic USSR.

It’s a shame that as science-fiction got tinged with science-fact – not to mention increased audience sophistication – Mars drifted out of orbit and was treated more as an object of exotica, with films such as Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (1964), and Mars Needs Women (1968). By the time Mars returned, in 1978, it had become less a place of awe than the unwitting party in a clever paranoid thriller, Capricorn One – itself a response to rumours that the first moon landing was staged in a TV studio.

So why the renewed Martian mania? The big difference between now and, say, Flash Gordon’s Trip to Mars in 1938 – when Buster Crabbe saved humanity from destruction by nitrogen-destroying lamp, and all the Martians spoke English – is that we have reasonable expectations of what we’ll find when we get there. Which is why the makers of Mission to Mars secured the expertise of Nasa and consultant astronaut Story Musgrave (a Nasa veteran of 30 years with six spaceflights under his utility belt) to ensure verisimilitude. Every piece of hardware and the human habitats, we are assured, has been faithfully replicated from designs sitting on mission control’s drawing-board. Nasa even had script approval.

“The film is very close to a trajectory that may exist in 2020, which is when Mission to Mars is set, but it’s important to realise that it’s not a documentary,” Musgrave stresses. “The movie has, by nature, to create the reality.”

In fact, there is something to pin it all on. The latest fleet of projects tracks its blast-off back to the “Martian meteorite” discovery and the 1997 Pathfinder mission which, as a ready-made marketing tool for Hollywood, secured 700-million hits on its website. The additional publicity of recent Nasa exploits (despite the Polar Lander and Mars Climate Orbiter mishaps) certainly won’t have hurt.

Though Nasa steps back from endorsing the movie (“We call it ‘participating’ in the making of the film,” says Nasa spokeswoman Bobbie Faye Ferguson), the agency’s logos, or “meatballs” as they are descriptively dubbed, adorn the spacesuits and all the equipment in the film – as they will in Clint Eastwood’s forthcoming Space Cowboys, another movie made with Nasa’s blessing.

“We had no financial interest in the making of that movie or any movie,” Ferguson asserts of Mission to Mars. “Federal agencies cannot do that.” But there’s still plenty to gain. With its “faster, cheaper, better” robotic odysseys failing to capture public imagination in the way the flag-waving Apollo missions did, Nasa needs to raise its profile. A manned Mars mission would cost $55-billion – around the same price as last year’s Kosovo operation.

“One of the things we do is try to increase awareness of space and spatial exploration,” says Ferguson. “Right now there is a lot of interest in a manned mission to Mars. There is no official manned mission listed, but that’s not saying there’s not a lot of people who aren’t very excited about it. I certainly think that participating in films that reach a large number of people, and that are feasibly fictional, increases the awareness of space and the future.”

James Cameron has made no bones about it, enlisting to his painstakingly researched projects Robert Zubrin, author of the bestseller The Case for Mars: The Plan to Settle the Red Planet and Why We Must. “I want to make humans-to-Mars real in the minds of the viewing public,” Cameron said at the second annual conference of the Mars Society, a think-tank advocating manned exploration.

It cuts both ways. While the scientific community will only begrudgingly acknowledge it, Hollywood has supplied more than a few ideas of its own over the years, beyond bequeathing the name Star Wars to Reagan’s satellite missile system. Indeed, those charged with the practicalities of Mars travel could do worse than watch Robert Altman’s Countdown, which got James Caan safely to the moon a year before Neil Armstrong (“Try begging for some of that Hollywood money. They’ve been making money off of aliens for years,” says Jodie Foster’s astronomer in Contact as she tries to raise capital for a space-monitoring project).

In 1991 Vivian Sobchack, film studies professor at UCLA and author of Screening Space: The American Science-Fiction Film, was co-opted on to a body called the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (Seti). Seti works with Nasa in formulating how to break the news to the general public if and when alien contact is made. “Ultimately,” says Sobchack, “one of the things on the agenda of Nasa and Seti was to have closer relations with the movie industry so we’d at least be closer in accuracy when conveying certain kinds of things.”

Conspiracy theorists go one further. Why, they ask, after years of vehemently denying the existence of the “face” on Mars – the mysterious rock formation dismissed as tricks of shadows and light – has Nasa given its backing to a film in which said face, albeit in absurd fashion, is the central issue? It is suggested that by allowing certain ideas to seep into factually based fiction, the public will become primed to accept whatever Nasa eventually reveals as fact, thus avoiding Orson Welles’s radio broadcast-style panic.

“That’s been our story for 50 years here – the fact that they put out disinformation and so forth,” says Carol Syska, director of the International UFO Museum and Research Centre at Roswell, New Mexico. “They’re very good at that.”

Nasa denies anything so sinister. “We at Nasa do not tell people how to make their movies,” states Ferguson. “A movie is fiction. This is not a documentary. It’s fiction. It’s a movie. Period.”