My Thoughts on "Mars Express"
Well, that certainly was something. I've been interested in watching this movie for a couple of months now. I first mentioned it in the foreword of my post on Rick Worley, among other things, and I've mentioned a few of other times in a few other posts since then. BTW, that Rick Worley post is the most popular post on this blog currently because of the times that I went back edited it and added to the foreword up top. Blogger counts all of your views, even if you're the author. The last time I mentioned this movie was in my review of Red Planet, which was a repost from my DeviantART page, and you can go read if you want. But, I finally got my hands on Mars Express last week, and I finally watched it yesterday. What did I think of it?
Well, I liked it until you know…it got to the end. Yes, that's right, this yet another movie where I was with it until the very end, where it just ended with a whimper. I oddly had sort of the same experience with this movie that I had with Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045, although that wasn't a movie of course, that was a show. I wrote a review of that also, it was a repost, and it was one of the first things I posted on here if you want you read it. I wrote a companion piece to the review where I expanded upon a few things I mentioned but didn't explain properly, or expanded on things I did talk at length in the review, but felt like elaborating on. Like, the whole Liberia stuff 🇱🇷. Read the companion piece if you want to know what that's all about.
But anyway, the point is that like with this show, I was board with this movie for most of it, I was intrigued by the plot and where it was going, I was liking the characters, I was enjoying the action, but then it gets to the end and it kind of loses me. Like, had the movie not gone in the direction that it did at the end, then I would've said that it was good, and that was worth the money 💵 that I spent on it (it wasn't cheap, Barnes & Noble charges a lot for movies…and books 📖), but I just couldn't.
I can't force myself to like the ending just because everyone else online adores this movie 😍 and says it's one of the greatest science fiction movies ever and even one of the greatest animated movies ever. I'm not that kind of that person. I'm not just going to go with the popular opinion just so I can be apart of the popular crowd, so I can be accepted or whatever. I've had a lot of hot takes on this blog that would probably make me very unpopular with certain people, and I probably wouldn't be accepted by certain groups because of those hot takes. But, I don't care. Those are my opinions, that's what I really think, and I'm not going to change just to be apart of the "in" crowd.
But, what are the things that I actually like about this movie before I talk about the thing that I didn't like in more detail? Well, I liked the story. I liked the characters. Mars Express, for the most part, is a standard cyberpunk detective story only it's set mostly on Mars. That's the reason why the movie's called Mars Express, because most of it set on the planet Mars. The opening scene is the only one that doesn't take place on Mars, but takes place on Earth 🌎 because the two main characters, Aline and Carlos are trying to catch this female hacker ♀︎ named Roberta Williams after she "jail broke" a robot.
He created this flag in 1999. Basically, it's a flag meant to represent Mars, just in case we ever establish a colony on there some day. This could be the flag that's raised by those Martian colonists as they form a new nation on this planet. Even though of course, as I said in the foreword of my Red Planet review, establishing a colony on Mars is a really dumb idea and will likely never happen.
But you know, it is still a nice looking flag. It was flown into space on the STS-103 Space Shuttle by astronaut, John M. Grunsfeld, and then it was used by the Flashline Mars Arctic Research Station which is meant to simulate Martian environmental conditions, giving people a taste of what it would actually be like living on Mars. It was done on behalf of the Mars Society, a non-profit organization that advocates for human exploration and habitation of Mars. They want people to not only walk on Mars and explore Mars, but also live on Mars. Which, as I and many others have said, is never going to happen and probably should never happen. Not so much the exploration part, but the habitation part. I don't think people should live on Mars, unless they have a death wish.
What about the colors though? What do the three colors on the flag represent? Well, they're meant to represent the three main stages of the terraforming process on Mars, as the planet transforms from a desolate, cold, and radioactive red planet ☢️ to a green lust planet with oceans, just like our Earth 🌎. Pascal Lee was inspired to use these colors specifically by the Mars trilogy, a trilogy of sci-fi books 📖 about terraforming Mars written by sci-fi author, Kim Stanley Robinson.
The first book 📖 is called Red Mars, the second book 📖 is called Green Mars, and the third and final book 📖 is called Blue Mars. There's a spin-off companion piece called The Martians, which is a collection of short stories set in the same universe, but the flag is only referencing the three main books 📖. BTW, Hollywood have been trying to adapt these books 📖 into a film trilogy or a TV series, but have failed every single time. Every attempt at adapting Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy has gone no where.
James Cameron got in on this, he couldn't get it to work. His ex-wife, Gale Anne Hurd tried her hand at it, it didn't work. Some guy named Jonathan Hensleigh tried to make something, he failed. A guy named J. Michael Stracyznski tried, and he too failed to make anything out of these books 📖. It's just like with Rendezvous with Rama, that book 📖 by Arthur C. Clarke—the same author as the 2001: A Space Odyssey book 📖—about an alien spaceship that looks like an O'Neill Cylinder.
Morgan Freeman has been trying to adapt that book 📖 into a movie for years, and so far has not succeeded. His production company, Revelations Entertainment bought the rights to book 📖, and so far has not yielded any results. But maybe one day, Rendezvous with Rama will get successfully adapted into a movie, by Morgan Freeman or somebody else. Just like with the Mars trilogy, maybe that too will be successfully adapted into a movie or a TV show. I mean, no body thought that the Foundation book series 📖 by Isaac Asimov would ever be successfully adapted, and yet we did get one eventually.
But anyway, I feel like it was a bit of a missed opportunity that this flag was not featured in this movie. I mean, it's not copyrighted or anything, so they could have used it if they wanted. I mean, this flag is a tricolor, and the French flag 🇫🇷 is also a tricolor, it would've been perfect.)
Jailbreaking basically means removing all of the limitations on a robot or android's programming. Just like jailbreaking a phone 📱. Expect to hear a lot about jailbreaking in this movie if you still choose to watch it after reading this review. Whenever a robot or android gets jail broke in this movie, they basically gain free will, and are able to do anything that they want, even if goes against their original programming. They even lose any restrictions that were placed upon them in their software. Like, Carlos has a restraining order against him from his ex-wife because he used to be abusive towards her when he used to be a human, and restraining order was programmed into him.
So, if he gets close to his ex-wife, or if he tries to hit her new asshole husband, his programming makes him stop, and his body just freezes, preventing him from moving or do anything that would do harm to his ex-wife or her husband. His programming also prevent him from using violence in any circumstance, even on his job, and even in self-defense. No violence is allowed for him. And like I said, her current husband's an asshole, and he takes full advantage of the fact that Carlos has a restraining order and that his programming literally prevents him being violent.
He's always treating Carlos like shit, like Carlos visits the house to deliver some flowers 💐 that he got from Earth 🌎 to his daughter, after he leaves, his ex-wife's new husband (who happens to be a cop) just throws them back at him, knowing that his programming prevents him from fighting back. Then later on, at the end, Carlos tries to see his daughter again after his partner, Aline just died and all seems lost, the first that his ex-wife's husband does is try to shoot him. Like, he shoots him with a shotgun because I guess he think he's gone crazy like all the other robots, but I also think it's because he just hates Carlos and just likes being an asshole to him for no reason.
Even when Carlos isn't doing anything bad, like Carlos always acts fairly peaceful towards the family, and isn't doing anything that would violate his restraining order. I guess he hates him and he treats him the way he does because his wife told him what Carlos did to her in the past, like he was all abusive towards her, that he beat her up among other things.
While that's all bad obviously, domestic violence is never okay under any circumstance, spousal abuse is never okay under any circumstance, it is obvious that Carlos regrets all of that. Since dying and losing his original body, and having his mind (his consciousness) be put into a robot body, he's redeemed himself and become a better man ♂︎, and he regrets treating his ex-wife the way that he did when he was a human. Especially since it's preventing him from seeing his daughter. He is paying for his actions every day of his life. Carlos is a broken man ♂︎ when this movie starts, and he's an even more broken man ♂︎ by the end of it.
Carlos's arc throughout this movie is probably one of the best things about this movie, even if I don't like where he ultimately ends up, the choice he ultimately makes. His character overall was one of the best things about this movie, he was one of my favorite characters coming out of this movie, which isn't really saying a whole lot since this movie really doesn't have that many characters to offer, and a lot of them aren't that great, they're either dull, forgettable, or just unlikable.
I guess this is what the director (or the producer or whoever that was) that said Carlos's character was both inspired by RoboCop, but is also a subversion of RoboCop. Carlos is like Alex Murphy in that like him, he was once a man ♂︎, but died, lost his original body, and was put into a robot body and lost a bit of his humanity in the process. But, unlike RoboCop, Carlos accepts his artificiality, and doesn't at all try to go back to being human. I mean, by the end, he pretty much gives up being human all together, and begrudgingly accepts being a machine, and accepts living inside a computer server possibly for the rest of his life.
But going back to what I was saying about why this movie is called Mars Express, besides the opening scene, most of this movie does take place on Mars. There's even a space airliner (a starliner I guess it would be called) in the movie that's called Mars Express, which is what I guess the title is actually referring to. Maybe it was one of those situations where they didn't have a title or the title was something else, but once they came up with the name of the starline, Mars Express, they decided to make that the title.
Like, "Oh, Mars Express, that has a nice ring to it. Let's make that the title." That's how it happens sometimes. It could also be a reference to the European orbiter by the same name, like there's an orbital satellite called Mars Express orbiting around Mars, and was launched by the European Space Agency (ESA). Maybe that's where they got the title from because this is a European movie 🇪🇺. It's a French movie 🇫🇷 to be precise.
One thing that I will say about the locations is that they didn't always clearly establish which planet we were on at any given time. Like, sometimes, the characters talked as if they were on Earth 🌎, while other times, they talked as if they were on Mars. It got kind of confusing to me at certain points, like "Is this on Earth 🌎 or is it on Mars?" They also didn't always clearly define which characters were humans, which ones were androids, and which ones were robots, and they didn't even clearly define what the difference between either of those are in this world. Like, for example, the main character for most of this movie, Aline.
I don't even know if she was supposed to be a human or android, because she had cybernetic eyes, or she was able to see computer screens on text in her eye. She had this inhibitor or something that prevented from her drinking alcohol 🥃 because she's a recovering alcoholic and she's in AA, and I guess she's been programmed so that she can't drink. Like, in the first half of the movie, every time she tries to go get a drink, something always stops her, like they always say she can't drink because she's in AA. She goes to bar, and they almost refuse her service because of the same thing.
So, is she a human or an android? The movie never really clarifies that. There are moment where it would suggest that she's human, and others that would suggest that she's an android. You might say, "Well, maybe that's part of the movie's message. Maybe they're intentionally trying to blur the lines as to which characters are human, and which ones aren't," but that I don't really think that's the case. I don't think they were trying intentionally trying to make Aline's nature ambiguous, they weren't trying to keep you guessing whether she was human or not because that's not really the message of the movie.
They don't really explain what even the difference between a robot and an android is? Like, what's even the difference? What distinguishes them? Why are two separate terms used for them if they're the same thing? The movie doesn't do a good job at explaining that. In fact, it leaves a lot of things vague. Worldbuilding is definitely not this movie's strong suit.
I mean, in the first half of the film, they mention this cataclysmic event called the "Novgorod Uprising," which I guess was this robot uprising that happened on Earth 🌎, and was caused by jailbreaking. They don't really elaborate on it that much, even though they talk about it as if it were a big deal. The only reason they even mention this "Novgorod Uprising" is to explain how Carlos died because he died during that event, and to foreshadow later what happens at the end. They also mention this planet a couple of times, in the Gliese 581 star system, that say might be habitable for humans, but then later say that it's uninhabitable. But, that never goes anywhere, they never do anything with that. It's just this thing in the background they mention a few times, and kind of make it seem like it's important or that it will be important later, but nothing ever comes of it.
You might say, "Well, maybe they kept mentioning that planet because it was foreshadowing for what happens at the end, that the robots are leaving Earth 🌎 and Mars to go live on that other planet in the Gliese 581 system." Well, that's directly contradicted by what Beryl says at the end to Carlos that they aren't actually going to another planet. They're just going to live space, on that spaceship floating around indefinitely. So, all that talk about that other planet orbiting around Gliese 581 is all for nothing. Might as well as been Proxima Centauri, and it'd have the same effect.
This movie isn't really about the philosophical question, "what makes us human?" This isn't like Blade Runner, or Ghost in the Shell, or Ergo Proxy, or Cyberpunk 2077, or even Altered Carbon maybe (remember that show) it has a completely different philosophical question it's trying to pose: "do AI and robot rights deserve equal rights? If they are sentient beings with their own thoughts and feelings, should they have own equivalent to human rights? Should they have civil rights?"
This is one of those movies that tries to use robots as a metaphor or an allegory for marginalized groups. It's sort of like The Animatrix with The Second Renaissance in that way or even like Detroit: Become Human. The robots in this are hatred by humans, probably because they "took all of their jobs," the movie's making that argument. They're treated as second class citizens, and they're not given the respect that they deserve.
In a lot of ways, they're treated like slaves, slave labor for the humans, and while some humans benefit from that, particularly the wealthy elites, others don't, like the poor and working class. I guess that is sort of one way that this movie is like Blade Runner, where the Replicants were treated as slaves, and not recognized as equals by the humans. They're either treated as tools or luxuries when they're doing as they're told or they're treated as monsters that need to be destroyed if they go off script, if they go off programming.
But, like I said, it is a bit more comparable to The Animatrix and how the Machines were portrayed in that. They aren't trying to argue that the robots in this are like humans at all like the Blade Runner films try to do with the Replicants. They do recognize that the robots are different from humans, but they deserve to treated with as much dignity and respect as humans, and shouldn't be treated as slaves or as second class citizens, and shouldn't be seen as threats.
The movie is very much on the robot's side for most of it, and it gets even more on their side at the end when the AI known as Beryl launches a mass exodus of all robots on Earth 🌎 and Mars into space to escape the mistreatment of humans. That's supposed to be seen as a triumphant moment, or like this was the right thing for the robots to do, and that this a "happy ending" or at the very least, a bittersweet ending.
But, what kind of message does that send to marginalized groups? To minorities who maybe mistreated in America 🇺🇸 and elsewhere in other countries? That the only way to deal with racism and discrimination is to run away from it? The only viable option is outright separatism? You see, that's always the problem with using robots as a metaphor for marginalized people and oppressed people, it always comes as clunky and awkward, and almost kind of offensive. I could see how the message of this movie could offend marginalized people, especially those who live in western countries, and particularly America 🇺🇸 if it's interpreted the way it's supposed to be interpreted.
I don't like the ending. I don't see it as a happy ending, I don't see it as a bittersweet ending. I see it a tragic ending. I see this ending where the robots just flat out leave, and go off into space away from human civilization as the least desirable outcome for everyone, not just the humans, but for the robots themselves. It feels like the humans won. The robots gave them what they wanted by leaving, instead of trying to make things better, and trying to coexist.
The human bad guy in the movie, Chris Royjacker, even says it, he says that the humans wanted the robots gone, and he programmed the takeover to get rid of them once and for all. I know the movie tries to do a twist on us by suggesting that Beryl is the one who actually programmed the takeover, who convinced all of the robots to leave, but how do we know that Beryl wasn't just programmed to think that?
For we all know, she was taken over too, and was manipulated into believing that the idea to take all of the robots and leave Earth 🌎 and Mars was her idea. Beryl, to me, seems like the instrument of Royjacker's evil plan to get rid of robots and replace them with organics, rather than an independent actor with her own agency who made that decision on her own. She's not human, she's an AI, and AI can be easily manipulated by humans especially in the real world. I'm sure the same applies to AI in this movie's universe, even if the AI is actual AI. Not the fake language models that tech companies call "AI" or "generative AI," those fake marketing terms 🙄.
It's not just the ending it was unsatisfying, it was Carlos himself that made the ending unsatisfying. He just goes along with Beryl's plan (although I question if it's her plan to begin with) and joins the servers with the millions of other robots who she took over, and convinced to leave Earth 🌎 and Mars with. Why? Because Aline dies (spoiler alert ⚠️) and his family hates him and fears him, even his own daughter. So, he has nothing to live for, nothing to lose, and goes along with the other robots. This is what I mean when I say that Carlos is even more broken man ♂︎ at the end of the movie than at the beginning of the movie. He just gives up, and I hate that. This is what I mean when I compare the ending of this movie to the ending Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045, the final couple of episodes. It ends in a way that makes everything that came before completely pointless.
Like, that whole investigation that Aline and Carlos go on in this movie into what Jun Chow was doing with the robots, and why Royjacker and his people were after her, all of that was for nothing by the end since the robots all just F off and fly into space. What was when the point in any of this? What were Aline and Carlos even trying to achieve? It seems like they ultimately failed at stopping Royjacker and other anti-robot humans from enacting their plan.
So, that's the big thing that I didn't like about this movie. Back to things I actually liked, the aesthetic. I liked the aesthetic of this movie. It didn't go for the typical cyberpunk aesthetic, you know, it didn't go for that Blade Runner or Cyberpunk 2077 or Altered Carbon look. You know the one, the one where everything always at night, everything shrouded in darkness, the buildings are all grey and black, and the only light is the light from the buildings, and usually blue light. There's usually a lot of blues in most cyberpunk media, maybe a few reds, yellows, and whites here and there, but mostly blue. There's not a lot of green, or purple in most cyberpunk media. There's pink sometimes, especially if it's a brothel or strip club, but it's a really common color to see in cyberpunk media.
But, this movie went with a different approach, it created its own aesthetic, and I appreciated that. Since this movie takes place on Mars, there's a lot of reds, oranges, and browns, but there's plenty of other colors too. There's some whites, silvers, greens, blues, yellows, and pinks. Still no purple though, what does cyberpunk media have against purple? But, it just the wider variety of colors and the use of those colors that makes this movie's aesthetic unique among other cyberpunk media, it's also variety of light.
There are actual daytime scenes in this movie, you know, everything not just always at night like in the Blade Runner movies. In fact, I would say that this movie is in daylight ☀️ most of the time. There's only a handful of nighttime 🌃 scenes in this entire time. That's one of the big rules of cyberpunk that movie broke, and I'm happy. The architecture, the way the buildings is also very unique. You have a lot of these clean streamlined buildings, like the office space or apartment that Aline and Carlos live. It looks beautiful, and there many other beautiful looking locations in this movie. That's probably one of its best aspects, it is truly visually stunning, and that's honestly one of the best things that a cyberpunk movie, show, or game can be.
But, even though Mars Express does create its own unique aesthetic that's different from other cyberpunk media, it doesn't completely disregard what came before either. This is a movie that wears its influences on its sleeve. Obviously, I mentioned RoboCop earlier, and the movie was definitely inspired by that. There's even this big killer robot at the end that's sort of like ED-209 except it's organic, it's made entirely of flesh. That's the new technology that the humans are rolling out to replace conventional robots made out of metal, these organic machines made out of flesh.
Royjacker even has this big giant organic machine in his room, this big fleshy monstrosity with a giant eyeball 👁️ floating inside of a water tank 💦. I kind of wished that they busted that tank open, and shot that thing to pieces at some point in the film, have blood 🩸 and water 💦 spill everywhere, but that never happens unfortunately. That's what I would've done, that's how I would've ended this movie.
But it was influenced by many other things. Blade Runner obviously, you can't exactly make a cyberpunk anything without taking some cues from it since it's arguably the granddaddy of all cyberpunk media (it's certainly what popularized it and made it kind of mainstream), and this movie definitely does, especially since it's mostly a detective story like the two Blade Runner films are. The two main characters are detectives (PIs to be exact), and the whole movie investigating this case, trying to solve a mystery 🔎 that may have global and historic implications.
You also got a lot of The Animatrix, especially the two-part short, The Second Renaissance which also explored the idea of robots being treated as second class citizens, indentured servants, and are basically being enslaved by humanity. Except unlike in this movie where the robots just decide to leave and live in space for all eternity, you know, until their power runs out, or their ship gets destroyed by some natural occurrence in space, and all the servers holding the robots' data and consciousness would be destroyed, the Machines in The Second Renaissance basically just decide to enslave humanity instead.
Well I mean, the Machines try to leave and establish their own settlement separate from the humans, but it ends up not being recognized by the UN 🇺🇳. They tried to get UN membership 🇺🇳, but the humans rejected it. So, their new country, Zero-One is an unrecognized state. But after Zero-One starts outperforming the other countries around the world economically, the humans just start a war against them unprovoked, and bomb their city-state with nuclear bombs ☢️. And then the Machines fight back and defeat humanity in this war, and basically do to them what they had to done to them for centuries only a thousand times worse.
They essentially turn humans into livestock, into living batteries to generate enough energy ⚡️ to power themselves and keep themselves alive, while imprisoning the humans inside of a computer simulation that looks like the way the world looked at the tail end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st. The message of the story ultimately being that humans have no body to blame but themselves for why the Machines turned on humanity, and took over the world, for why the Earth 🌎 is a desolate wasteland with little-to-no life, and why the Matrix even exists.
There's also a lot of Ghost in the Shell in this movie. Ghost in the Shell is probably the one thing that this movie probably takes the most inspiration besides The Animatrix and RoboCop. Like, they take the whole talking in your mind thing from Ghost in the Shell, there are several scenes in this movie where characters will have entire phone conversations in their heads. They aren't moving their mouths because they aren't speaking with their mouths, they're speaking with their minds.
That's one of the main things that Ghost in the Shell is known for (besides the invisibility suit that blends in with Motoko Kusanagi's skin and makes her look naked, or the intro of the 1995 movie where she's being assembled or those characters with cybernetic hands that open up and form these little fingers so that they can type faster), and this movie took that from it.
Although, it did manage to show how awkward it would be the other person on the other side watching someone have one of these mind phone calls and not being able to hear what they're saying, in one of the few truly funny moments in this movie. It's a lot like watching those scenes in the Venom movies where Eddie is communication with Venom in his mind, or Venom is speaking to him in his mind while he's in public, and not being able to actually hear what he's saying.
The look of the movie, the look of the cities is a lot more reminiscent of Ghost in the Shell than it is Blade Runner. Specifically, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, its prequel series, Ghost in the Shell: Arise, and its sequel series, Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045, and the 2017 live action movie that everyone likes to hate on. Not the 1995 movie, that was still very much taking after Blade Runner as did most other cyberpunk media in the 80s and 90s.
And Ghost in the Shell: Innocence and the weird remastered, re-animated version of the 1995 movie called Ghost in the Shell 2.0, that's a whole other style of its own. It's comparable to anything else, not even within the Ghost in the Shell franchise itself. BTW, speaking of reminiscent, Reminiscence (talk about wasted potential with that movie) is another movie that I reviewed back in 2021 that I should probably repost on here sometime. Anyway, back to what I was saying about Ghost in the Shell.
The 2017 live action movie does take a lot of stuff from the 95 movie, including the basic plot (kind of), but also takes a lot of stuff from the Stand Alone Complex stuff. That's where the robot geishas came from, they came from Stand Alone Complex. But, the visual language of Mars Express is much more comparable and in-line with the visual language of Stand Alone Complex sub-franchise and of the 2017 live action movie where there's a lot more daytime scenes ☀️, not everything's at night and rainy ⛈️, there's a wider variety of colors than just blue, grey, and black, and there's a lot more variation in architecture than just pyramids, skyscrapers, and brutalist Soviet-style buildings ☭. Like, the city in the 2017 live action movie is basically just Hong Kong 🇭🇰 but with giant holograms on all the buildings.
The only difference between that and Mars Express is that Mars Express has a lot more clean and streamlined architecture. There's a lot of things in this movie that just look sleek, almost like in Elysium, that movie that Neill Blomkamp made after District 9 that no one really seemed to care that much about. Like the look of this movie is a combination of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, Ghost in the Shell (2017), and Elysium. That's the best way I can describe it.
Even Aline and Carlos's dynamic is a lot more comparable to Motoko and Batou's dynamic in the Ghost in the Shell franchise than anything in Blade Runner or Blade Runner 2049. And also, Anne Lewis and Alex Murphy's dynamic in RoboCop and RoboCop 2, that too. There's even a bit of Terminator 2 in here as well since the bad guys have these liquid metal bodies I guess, or maybe they're organic, I don't know what, but they have the ability to turn their arms into blades, like knives and stabbing weapons, just like the T-1000 in Terminator 2: Judgment Day. One of the bad guys even runs after Aline and Jun like the T-1000 did. Almost exactly the same run.
The director, or producer, or whoever that was did that interview with GKIDS, the company that distributed this movie in North America, also mentioned that they were inspired by indie games, but I don't really know where the indie game inspiration came in, other than maybe the music, which is fantastic by the way.
The action scenes are spectacular. There aren't a ton of action scenes in this movie, it is mostly an investigation movie, a murder mystery kind of, but whenever there is action, it's pretty spectacular. I liked the opening chase scene where Aline and Carlos are trying to apprehend Roberta Williams and her robot companion and criminal accomplice, LEM, the robot that she jail broke, that was an entertaining scene.
I liked that other scene where Royjacker's people attack that strip club or brothel or whatever that place was, and are trying to kill Jun and her android duplicate because she duplicated herself and had her duplicate go out there and make some extra money 💵 for her as a prostitute to pay her tuition and to support her parents financially since they lost their jobs. They were farmers or something, and they lost their farm.
Speaking of farms, a really interesting idea or technology that this movie has were brain farms 🧠, where people can rent out their brains 🧠, sell their data in their heads to make a quick buck. They don't explain it that well and I'm not entirely sure if I even understood it correctly, but it was an intriguing and appropriately dystopian idea. This is the kind of stuff that cyberpunk is all about.
I also liked the scene where Aline and Carlos get attacked by Royjacker's goons inside the tunnel that was built into the side of a cliff, that was a cool scene, especially since there was tension with Aline being trapped in the car because of foam stuff that fills up the car that's like the future version of airbags, and the tunnel's automatic emergency system is trying to get her out, while the bad guys are shooting at the car, trying to kill her, and Carlos is seemingly no where to be found. But then, Carlos reappears out of there, and shoots all of the bad guys, and saves Aline, and that's how it's revealed that Carlos was jail broke by Roberta.
I even liked the final fight when Aline and Carlos go to confront Royjacker at his residence, his mansion up on the hill, and they get attacked by the guards (the same dudes who attacked them before) and by that big organic machine that shoots spikes out of its tail. Even if, like I said before, I kind of wished that they had shot that big organic machine that Royjacker kept in his room inside of that tank, as a way of capping off this climax. That was a missed opportunity in my opinion.
Lastly, I did like the robot designs in this movie. They were very cool and unique. I liked that none of them looked human. I mean, there's no reason for them to look human since they have androids can be the really human-like ones. The ones you wouldn't be able to tell the difference from a regular human. With the robots, they just ran wild with their designs. Some of them did remind me of the robots in Elysium. Like, some of them look like they were designed by Aaron Beck or Christian Pierce, the artists who were the lead concept artists on Elysium and CHAPPiE. It seems like the concept artists behind this movie were inspired by their work.
Some of the robots even look like they were designed by an artist named Ben Mauro, a lead concept artist on films such as Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (another indie sci-fi French film 🇫🇷 that bombed at the box office 💣 and hardly anyone saw, and is the real record holder as the most expensive independent film ever made, it was also directed by the same guy who directed The Fifth Element), The Predator (that Predator movie that no one likes that Shane Black directed and co-wrote with Fred Dekker, the same guy who he previously collaborated with on The Monster Squad), and also an unmade Metal Gear Solid movie. Unlike Beck or Pierce, Mauro's robot designs tend to be more curvy and elegant, a lot of them have long limbs, and the robots in this movie certainly look like that, especially LEM.
There's also this weird female gold android ♀︎ with a unicorn horn that keeps popping up throughout the film. She belongs to this professor at the university that Aline and Carlos keep going back to question, and I can only assume that he uses this gold android as a glorified sexdoll. Like, she's only there to serve his sexual pleasure, his sexual gratification, and also to give him company since he seems like a pretty sad lonely man ♂︎. They even put this gold android on the poster. Like, why? She isn't even a main character, he's a background character, a side character at best.
I guess her design was so striking, that visual of her face in front of the window was so striking that they decided to put it on the poster even if she herself isn't really that important of a character. I guess it's sort of the same philosophy behind putting the Diva on the back covers of all the DVD, Blu-Ray, and 4K releases 📀💿 of The Fifth Element, although the Diva was way more important to the plot of The Fifth Element than the gold unicorn android chick ♂︎ was to the plot of Mars Express.
I even liked the organic machines they introduce in the middle, machines that are from fresh rather than metal, that's a cool idea. This makes this one of the few cyberpunk films to incorporate biotechnology, unless you count Blade Runner and Blade Runner 2049 since the Replicants in those movies are not robots or androids. They're organic beings created through genetics 🧬. That's a detail about the Blade Runner films that a lot of people seem to miss, including fans of the movies.
And also, Johnny Mnemonic, with that cyborg dolphin 🐬 that was a hacker, which was something that William Gibson took from one of his books 📖. I know Johnny Mnemonic was already based on one of his short stories, but the cyborg dolphin 🐬 was already something from one of William Gibson's books 📖 before he wrote Johnny Mnemonic, the short story and the movie; he co-wrote the screenplay. I think it might've been from Neuromancer, his most popular and influential book 📖. If I'm wrong on that, please correct me in the comments.
I'm surprised this movie went without mentioning nanotechnology, but I guess the filmmakers decided that biotechnology was enough of a leap from conventional robotics that it kind be too much to include nanotechnology. Unless I missed something, and they did have nanotechnology. Maybe Royjacker's goons have nanotechnology built into them. Maybe that's why they're able to shapeshift. But, it could just be the organic biotechnology that kept talking about, showing, and emphasizing through the film. That's a possibility.
Mars Express is just kind of an okay movie. Not good, not great, not bad, and not horrendous, just okay. It's a pretty average film in terms of quality. There are plenty of good aspects, I talked about them here in this review, but also some bad aspects, and some things that irked me, the ending being one of them.
This movie's ending is pretty unsatisfying, and will leave you feeling empty by the end of it, and feeling as if the hour and 29 minutes you just watched, being invested in this story, in these characters was all for nothing. It felt like a waste. Had this movie stuck the landing, had the ending delivered, I would've walked away from this movie feeling satisfied and feeling confident in saying that it was a good film and that you should watch it. And it's not like this movie will get a sequel.
I don't think Jérémie Périn has any intention of making a sequel to this movie, even if it was successful, which I'm not even sure if it was. The movie made $1.5 million 💵 at the domestic French box office 🇫🇷 against a budget of €9 million 💶, since France 🇫🇷 was the only place where this movie got a wide theatrical release. Everywhere else, it was released on home video. I don't know if $1.5 million 💵 is a good box office take or not. But regardless of how much money 💵 it made, I still don't think Jérémie has any intention of making a sequel to Mars Express. I think he just wants it to be a standalone movie, a one-and-done thing. This is it.
If you're someone that's really into cyberpunk, or someone who's into anime-inspired films, or even just foreign animated films in general, you might get a kick of this. I said before this movie is best described as a mixture between Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, Ghost in the Shell (2017), and Elysium, but I'll put it another way. This movie is like Ghost in the Shell if it were made by Frenchmen 🇫🇷. That's a great way to describe this movie. But even then, I still don't think it completely works. Like, even if you're a die hard cyberpunk fan, I don't see how much enjoyment you could realistically get out of this.
Maybe I'm in the minority on this movie since so many people seem to adore it online. Every other review I've seen of this movie has been positive, and sung glowing praise for this movie and its director/co-writer. I could see this movie developing a cult following with certain people, like this movie seems primed to become a minor cult film. That seems like the audience that Jérémie was aiming for with this movie, he wasn't aiming for general audiences. He wasn't aiming for this to be a mainstream hit. I could also see this being the kind of movie that will be analyzed by film essayists and film analysts and other people online who think they're smarter than they actually are for years to come. But, for me, it just wasn't the kind of movie for me unfortunately. I had high hopes for this movie. I wanted it to be good, I wanted to like it. But, I just didn't really.
Comments
Post a Comment