BEFORE: So there will be some skip days here in September, because I have to spread these films out a bit, and therefore leave enough slots open to be able to watch films in November and December. Not a lot, because I hope to be busy - and also, I'm very busy NOW, my September is filling up with shifts, which I hope makes up for being forced to take two months off. Yes, the actors strike is still going on, so there are no celebrities coming around to help promote movies, and that's part of what makes my job interesting - but I've got to hold out and believe that the strike will end at some point, it's just that nobody knows when. I got into a debate with my BFF about this the other night, he seems to think that the strike will be short because the TV and streaming executives are going to start running out of product. However, I think the strike will go on much longer, and we're already seeing the networks running more unscripted shows like "Camp Buddy" and bringing back shows like "Hell's Kitchen", "The Masked Singer", "Survivor", "Lego Masters" and "The Amazing Race" - so I think TV executives have dug in for the long haul and they're prepared for the strike to go on for months.
Movie releases are being moved around, also, because studios would rather release their films when the stars will be willing to promote them, in other words, a lot of the films planned for late 2023 now won't be released until the strike is over. (Watch, as soon as I post my prediction that the strike will last another six months, the news will break that it's ending next week...). I'd love to see everyone get back to work making movies, but I'm not holding my breath for it, since neither side seems to want to budge. I've got a list of over 500 movies to catch up on, so I should be good for the duration. I think the late night talk-shows will be hardest hit, and so far they've all shown their support for the writers by not making any new shows, only how long can they just run repeats? During a previous writer's strike I remember Letterman coming up with various "Network Time Fillers", like making toast on his desk, or having a suit tailored for him on camera. I think at some point these shows may be forced to pivot and go back on the air without monologues, and just interview sports stars and politicians - because there is an election season coming up. And boy, I think Trevor Noah and James Corden look really smart now, for quitting their shows before the strike hit.
Liev Schreiber carries over from "The Reluctant Fundamentalist".
THE PLOT: A group of astronaut explorers succumb one by one to a mysterious and terrifying force while collecting specimens on Mars.
AFTER: Well, jeez, I'm kind of pushing the season here, because I wasn't planning on getting to any more horror material until October 1 rolled around - but there's certainly a horror element to this sci-fi film. But I remember there was some horror pre-gaming last year, too - as "Muppets Haunted Mansion", "Last Night in Soho", "Morbius" and four of the "Purge" movies were all watched in September, as kind of a lead-in to the main horror chain. Trust me, the chain knows what it's doing, because if I had waited until October 1 to watch "Muppets Haunted Mansion", then I would have had too many horror films to fit into October, and I would have had to either cut some of them, or cancel our October vacation. I only watched 19 films in October 2023, but then figure in 8 days on vacation and 4 days at Comic-Con, and you'll see that all adds up to the 31 days of October, right? So therefore I had to start the themed chain a little early.
But this year it's just one horror film in September, not 6 or 7. Sure, I could have skipped this one, because it's the middle film in a mini-chain of three Liev Schreiber movies, but based on the cast list, and the fact that the actors in this movie just aren't in many other films on my list, and NONE of them are in horror movies on my list, really, I have to watch this one HERE, bookended by other Liev S. appearances, or else I just don't know when else I could watch it. Literally now or never, and I've got to clear more films of the DVR, so away it goes.
Horror and sci-fi have mixed together before, of course, most notably in the "Alien" films, but also there's the "Predator" films, and, well, any alien invasion films from "The War of the Worlds" to "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" and this year's "Nope" and "Extinction". (I simply MUST remember to bundle these together for my year-end wrap-up...). In this film, the crew of international astronauts stationed on Mars are very frustrated because their 8-month mission is coming to an end, and soon they'll have to pack up for the 6-month journey back to Earth, and wouldn't you know it, they find evidence of life on Mars on the very last day?
However, it's not anything you'd really recognize as animal life, instead it's a virulent bacterial organism that can get into a dead human body and re-animate it, make it move around and do things, even kill other people to get more bodies for the bacteria to replicate in. Umm, yeah, that's not good. But, on the other hand, this has now become a successful mission, because they found life on another planet! Umm, yay? Now all they have to do is survive against their ex-team members who are trying to kill and infect them, and that's easier said than done. Yes, essentially these are Mars zombies, space zombies.
But the film easily falls right into that "Alien" formula of killing off the team members, one by one, and then out of the remaining team members, there's constant questions about which of them, if any, have already been infected by the virus. (Just like how in "Alien", you never knew which team member might have a little alien baby growing inside of them...). And then of course, paranoia sets in, because each team member starts wondering about the person next to them, or if they themselves got infected when the space zombie scratched them. And remember, these people were already going a little mad because they've been either in confined spaces or spacesuits for the last 8 months, and for 6 months before that on the way TO Mars, and now some were going stir crazy at the thought of flying back to Earth. Well, there's good news and bad news - the good news is, most of you aren't going to be catching that spaceship back to Earth now....
It's also too bad that there's no element of mystery here, we pretty much know what's gone wrong from the start, it just takes the astro-nuts a little longer to figure it all out. Damn it, wouldn't you know that their expert on extra-terrestrial bacteria life was one of the first people infected? What terrible luck...and I suppose it's a bad sign that during a movie featuring astronauts vs. space zombies that I was sort of rooting for the zombies? Or maybe the sandstorm, those effects were really the highlight of the film, which isn't really a compliment.
When we visited the Johnson Space Center in Houston, back in 2018, we saw models of the crafts NASA was planning to use for the Artemis missions, which have the goal of placing a permanent settlement on the moon, and then ultimately bringing the first people to Mars in the 2030's. What we learned is that NASA is still looking for people who would be willing to spend six months in a very small spacecraft just to GET to Mars, without going stir crazy, if that's possible. And that's only half the battle, getting them there, as there are a host of other problems involved with getting them BACK, and some of those problems are physical, while others are psychological. So this movie at least gets THAT right - but would somebody want to spend all that time in close quarters to get there, knowing there might be bacteria on Mars that would turn them into space zombies? I don't think so...
I'm also reminded tonight about the Toynbee tiles, which I haven't seen in quite some time. There used to be these tiles that somebody placed on the streets of major U.S. cities, carrying a message like "Toynbee idea in 2001 - Resurrect dead on planet Jupiter", which was mysterious as all get out back in the mid-1990's. Somebody who was a fan of Stanley Kubrick's film "2001" apparently wanted to get the word out that this film was based on the ideas of a British historian named Arnold Toynbee, or perhaps a short story by Ray Bradbury that name-checked him, which suggested the possibility of re-animating dead people if we could only find a way to get them across the solar system to Jupiter. But that's not really what happens in the film "2001", in fact just a lot of astronauts die because the ship's computer, HAL, couldn't lie to them and chose to kill them instead. (The dangers of A.I. are real, Arthur C. Clarke warned us...)
So much mystery around these tiles - what, exactly, does the message mean? Are we all supposed to pile corpses on a rocket and point that towards Jupiter? Or is this a metaphor for something else? Also, who made the Toynbee tiles, and how did they put them into place on paved roads without being seen? There was a documentary made about them, released in 2011, and I've never thought to track it down - now maybe I should, although I don't see how I'm ever going to link to it.
Also starring Elias Koteas (last seen in "Atlantic City"), Romola Garai (last seen in "The Last of the Blonde Bombshells"), Olivia Williams (last seen in "The Father"), Johnny Harris (last seen in "Welcome to the Punch"), Goran Kostic (last seen in "The Zookeeper's Wife"), Tom Cullen, Yusra Warsama, Patrick Joseph Byrnes (last seen in "The Man Who Invented Christmas"), Mark Clark, Paul Warren (last seen in "Star Wars: Episode VIII - The Last Jedi") and the voice of Lewis Macleod.
RATING: 5 out of 10 soil samples
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