BEFORE: When I was a kid, it was rare to get my Dad to go to the movies - he'd just say, "Eventually, the movie will be on TV, and I can watch it for free..." Though I did get him to make exceptions for "Star Wars", "Ghostbusters", and maybe one or two others. But I now find myself in a somewhat similar position - I haven't been to the theater in over a year, and today I was in a Barnes & Noble and considered purchasing "Avatar" or "2012", either of which would fit well in my current chain - but they were each about $30, so I passed. So my credo is, "Eventually, these movies will be on premium cable, and I can watch them for (almost) free..." I just hate paying more than $5 for a movie - between the $5 DVD store, and $1.99 movies on demand, why go to the theater?
Instead, I'll circle back and pick up the astronaut movies I accidentally skipped a few weeks ago. I think this movie is set in the near-future (made in 1977) but they never give an exact year.
THE PLOT: A NASA Mars mission won't work, and its funding is endangered, so they decide to fake it just this once. But then they have to keep the secret...
AFTER: It's somewhat appropriate to watch this movie now - the main reason to fake the Mars landing stems from a fear of losing government funding for NASA (though I don't think they ever say "NASA" in this film, they just say "the Program") and recently there have been reports of our government ending all funding for manned space flight. And it's not because of Stephen Hawking's warnings about aliens, I think it's probably just the recession kicking in - plus, what financial benefit would we get from sending men to Mars?
(ASIDE: why is it always men going to Mars? Doesn't NASA know that "Mars Needs Women"? Plus that long trip to Mars gets awful lonely - throw these guys a bone and send some eye candy along...)
Anyway, in a nod to the eternal "moon landing hoax" urban legends, this film depicts a Mars landing that is faked on a sound-stage. The three astronauts go along with the ruse, having been convinced that it's what's best for the space program. The real rocket heads to Mars, but since the life-support system doesn't work right, the men stay on Earth and broadcast from a remote location, with an extra time-delay added to simulate the distance between Earth and Mars.
Any NASA technician who notices anything hinky is made to disappear - and this leads a journalist (Elliott Gould) to start nosing around. Once the mission is over, and the space capsule burns up on re-entry, the astronauts realize that their being seen alive would be a publicity nightmare, and that NASA's probably going to rub them out too.
Believable? I dunno... NASA's been known to scrub a mission at the drop of a hat - so why continue with a mission that's doomed to fail? And you expect me to believe that the space program can launch a rocket, get a capsule to Mars, land an unmanned capsule remotely on Mars, get it BACK from Mars, and just not be able to include any astronauts on board? Why not wait another couple weeks and just work out the kinks in the life-support system - or am I missing something?
And the way that the lie leads to another lie, and to another cover-up... Don't you think that the U.S. people would understand that the government lies, after Watergate, Vietnam, and the Warren Commission?
And we see the same plothole with "Soylent Green" - there would be so many people involved in the deception, faking the Mars landing - what are the chances of every single person involved keeping completely quiet?
Starring James Brolin (both of Barbra Streisand's husbands in the same film!), Sam Waterston, O.J. Simpson, Hal Holbrook, Brenda Vaccaro, Karen Black, and cameos from David Doyle, Telly Savalas and David Huddleston (famous for the line about "We don't want any Irish!" from "Blazing Saddles" as well as being the "Big Lebowski" in the movie of the same name)
RATING: 4 out of 10 jumpsuits
The problem with this movie was pretty clear to me: they started the story too early. It should open exclusively from Eliot Gould's perspective, watching the launch and the landing on TV, watching news reports about how important it was that this Mars thing go off without a hitch, what an impact the landing had on both the public and the space program...then the command module burns up on re-entry. Something doesn't add up right, and then the reporter realizes what must have happened and figures out that the astronauts are now fighting for their lives, etc.
ReplyDeleteToo often, a filmmaker gets obsessed with the Why and the How of the story. But if you spend a half an hour telling the audience "This scheme to fake a Mars landing is pretty much the most important part of the movie" then we can't help but focus on the weak points.
A better movie would have said "How NASA did this isn't important. The important thing is that there are three dead astronauts who are actually alive astronauts, but who'll soon be dead if this reporter doesn't get to them in time."
Think about ET, for example. It couldn't have mattered less what the spaceship was doing there, how ET got stranded, what he was supposed to be doing on Earth, whether the other aliens were looking for him, what they intended to do if they didn't find him...so you don't really think about how that massive ship managed to land twice without being detected.