BEFORE: Asa Butterfield carries over from "Nanny McPhee Returns" and bouncing around his filmography for a couple days will lead me into some time-travel films, which leads into a Fred Willard chain, which takes me to horror films for October. Both easy and peasy at this point.
I'm not even that upset that this film WAS on Netflix when I added it to the list, and is no longer on that platform, which means I have to pay $3.99 to watch it on iTunes - that's just the game right now, keep the chain going no matter what, even if I have to chase down a couple films each month on different platforms. What's going to be harder is creating romance chains and horror chains for next year, it's going to be a lot of work organizing the films on my list into something coherent - we're talking about HOURS of work just to make something for next February, because the list is constantly changing, and I'll have to assemble something out of what's left over from February 2021 that I didn't get to, plus films that have become available since then, plus films that I'm not even aware of, not on my list but they may be able to help me make the connections that I'm going to need. But I don't even have time to think about that right now, it's a problem for another day.
THE PLOT: The first human born on Mars travels to Earth, experiencing the wonders of the planet through fresh eyes. He embarks on an adventure with a street-smart girl to discover how he came to be.
AFTER: Well, at least this is one of the more original ideas for a movie plot that I've seen - the story of the first person born on Mars. The first real Martian, essentially - Matt Damon in that other movie called "The Martian" wasn't REALLY a Martian, he was just an Earthling living on Mars. And I guess this is also the opposite to the movie "Brightburn", which depicted an alien child growing up on Earth, this has an Earth child growing up on another planet.
You have to figure that if we're going to colonize another planet someday, then somebody's got to be the first one born there, even if gestating in zero-gravity and then developing on a planet with less gravity and atmosphere is bound to cause some form of health problems. I wonder if somebody took the time to research this, or just made up some health issues that sounded likely.
Naturally, on a mission to Mars you wouldn't want to send a pregnant woman as a test case, even though all astronauts are technically like lab rats, it's not usually THIS blatant - so the plot here sort of has to bend itself over backwards to make allowances for how this might happen, even accidentally. Some of these plot elements seem likely, while others are, like "COME ON, that wouldn't happen that way, would it?" The truth is that maybe we don't know right now, what problems Earth people might encounter, being pregnant in space or giving birth on another world. So, I don't know, maybe?
We visited the Johnson Space Center in Houston back in...umm...it was 2018. I remember because we missed the 50th anniversary of the moon landing by one year. We were shown a giant room full of space capsules, past, present and future, and they told us that one was being tested for possibly taking astronauts to Mars - it looked tiny. In this film they show a giant spacecraft going to Mars, one that was built in orbit to launch from orbit, and there was plenty of room for people to work and move around in it. I have a feeling that the truth will be very different, and they better find some astronauts who aren't claustrophobic and can stand being in a small craft for nearly two years.
But, will it take that long? I'm getting conflicting information from this film and the web - in this movie, they make the journey in "months", but they don't say exactly how many months. Other sources online say that the journey could take two years, so now I don't know who to believe. I realize that there's probably a complex relationship between time, weight and fuel, plus the two planets are only close enough for a trip between them every two years, so there are apparently good times to launch and then terrible times as well. Something called a Hohmann transfer between the orbits of the two planets would theoretically take between eight and nine months, but SpaceX is planning a different method that could shorten the trip to six months, but would use more fuel in doing so. (See, come for the movie review, stick around for the lesson in astrophysics.)
The whole project - in the film, that is - is funded by a billionaire CEO, and maybe this is the future we're going to get now that Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk have all made their forays into "space", or really just the inner edge of outer space. When this fictional billionaire learns that his lead female astronaut is pregnant, and then dies during childbirth, his first instinct is to cover this up, thinking it would be terrible PR to have not scrubbed the mission, put this woman's life in danger and accidentally created the first earthling born on Mars, who know has health problems as a result. But, NITPICK POINT, is it at all feasible that everyone on the Mars colony would be able to keep this boy's existence a secret? They all talk with their families back on Earth, so are those messages monitored and edited? What about leaks, or Wikileaks? Any computer conversations between Earth and the Mars colony could be hacked, so it seems quite unbelievable that this secret could be kept for any amount of time.
For that matter, NITPICK POINT #2, Gardner, the first boy born on Mars, develops a friendship over FaceTime (or whatever) with Tulsa, a female high-school student in Colorado. He claims to be a NYC teen with a rare disease that prevents him from leaving his apartment - but they communicate in real-time, and the very nature of their interplanetary communication would seem to make that impossible, there would be a delay of at least several minutes between responses. Tulsa would probably get upset over time that Gardner takes so long to respond - or perhaps suspicious of him.
Gardner learns what he can of Earth through old movies, but unfortunately he watches some very outdated ones, and has a strange view of male-female relationships as a result. (But then, NITPICK POINT #3, why does he get so freaked out later when he sees someone riding a horse? Didn't he ever watch any Westerns in the Mars video library?). Gardner then has some surgeries to increase his bone density, and eventually (once that two-year launch window comes around, I guess) gets a seat on a shuttle back to Earth. He's, well, not prepared for interacting with the humans there - but again, does this make sense? I could see it if he had alone on Mars all this time, but he wasn't, he was in a colony of other people, so I can see him being a little backwards interacting with others, but I don't think he should be THIS backwards. Right?
Sure, he's never seen an ocean, OK, maybe he's never seen anybody ride a horse - he knows how cars work because he's ridden in exploratory vehicles on the Mars surface, and he knows what movies, TV and computers are. But he doesn't know what sunglasses are? Or insects? I guess they had to draw that line somewhere, but it's a weird place to draw it, that's all. I think he should have been more blown away by Earth food, I mean this teen's been eating meals out of tubes for years, drinking Tang and enjoying (?) freeze-dried ice cream, why isn't he super-fascinated by pancakes, or fried chicken or banana splits? That would make a lot more sense to me. If I had just hit earth for the first time, I'd probably go on a road trip to try every kind of BBQ - wait, I have done that. Or I'd hit all the buffets in Vegas - wait, I have done that, too.
Gardner and Tulsa visit the Grand Canyon, because there's a shaman there who apparently married his parents, and after that, they stop in Las Vegas, which if you think about it, sort of allows him to visit a whole bunch of Earth cities all at once, there's Paris, the Venetian, that New York-themed casino, even ancient Egypt at the Luxor. Gardner realizes almost right away that Las Vegas isn't real, and so I have to conclude he's very intelligent - it took me a week in Vegas in 2019 to get that same feeling, and I went on a rant about how it's a big fake city with fake versions of other cities within it, and maybe there's just no THERE there, except for the wide variety of food at the buffets. That was my favorite part, obvi, I think we hit 5 buffets in 8 days. (Kids, I'm a professional, don't try this yourself, please eat responsibly.)
Gardner and Tulsa make their way to California, stealing car after car, to reach the man he believes to be his father, and they're pursued by the Space Corp. billionaire and the woman who sort of raised Gardner on Mars as a surrogate mom. There are still a few twists in the story, so I'll shut up now. But it feels a bit like the writers couldn't decide on a happy ending or a sad one, so they just decided to do both and leave things a bit open. But as a result the film doesn't really end, it just sort of stops. Whatever, it's still an original idea even if I have to do some grunt work at the end.
Also starring Gary Oldman (last seen in "The Woman in the Window"), Carla Gugino (last seen in "The Lookout"), Britt Robertson (last seen in "Mother's Day"), BD Wong (last seen in "Bird Box"), Janet Montgomery (last seen in "Our Idiot Brother"), Trey Tucker, Scott Takeda (last seen in "Whiskey Tango Foxtrot"), Adande Thorne, Colin Egglesfield (last seen in "Vice" (2015)), Gil Birmingham (last seen in "The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 2"), Logan Paul, Danny Winn, Lauren Chavez-Myers (last seen in "12 Strong"), Zacciah Hanson, Jesse Romero, Tim D. Janis, Luce Rains (last seen in "Hostiles"), Esodie Geiger, Jenny Gabrielle (last seen in "Employee of the Month") and the voice of Peter Chelsom.
RATING: 6 out of 10 transparent laptops
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