Peter Hyams both wrote and directed this cynical business about flaws in the space program that first lead three young astronauts -- James Brolin, Sam Waterston, and O. J. Simpson -- to participate in a Mars landing faked on a sound stage by the program's head, Hal Holbrook. During the "return mission", after which everything is supposed to be just fine and dandy, there's yet another failure in the hardware, the space capsule blows up during reentry, and the astronauts, kept under guard at a remote landing field, figure things out and decide they'd better vamoose. I mean, "dead" can't become anything other than dead without the quotes.
They make it into the middle of a wasteland before their airplane runs out of fuel and crash lands. Then they stride off in three different directions in hopes that one of them will find a phone booth, a police station, a hospital, a newspaper, or a Starbucks coffee shop.
A grueling trek ensues. O. J. and Waterston are picked up and -- well, we don't find out what happened to them except that they disappear. Let's hope they didn't disappear to the same place that nosy technician disappeared to when he twigged on the ruse at Command Control.
Hyams hasn't written what anyone would call a tight plot. The faked jump from the landing module to the surface of "Mars" ("We make this leap in the name of all mankind") ought to be one of, if not THE, most gripping moment in the story. It raises all sorts of questions. Who wrote their phony dialog from Mars? ("The surface seems powdery.") Who dreamed up the Martian landscape? But it lasts no more than five minutes and the backdrop and lighting look as slapped together as in a "Dragnet" episode.
The dialog is no help either. "This is a good, old-fashioned, American, can-do, red-white-and-blue favor I'm asking." (Something like that.) The characters are stereotypes. Brolin is the sober commander of the three. Waterston provides the comic relief, which isn't very comic. O. J. has no lines to speak of -- just as well.
Hyams does much better with the action scenes. There's an out-of-control speeding car with Eliot Gould, as a meddlesome reporter, behind the wheel. No brakes, he can't shut the ignition off, the parking brake doesn't work, he can't down shift, an open drawbridge looms in the offing, and -- well, you know how it goes by now. It's exciting. It would have been just as exciting if the camera hadn't been under cranked to speed up the motion artificially. And you can pretty much tell this is a post-"French Connection" film because a camera is mounted on the speeding car at about one foot above the zipping pavement.
Motion is accelerated during the airplane chase too, where it REALLY doesn't belong, but the chase itself -- two armed government helicopters after a beat-up old biplane, swooping down among the desert canyons, looping around crags, without CGIs -- is thrilling. And obviously dangerous. The airplanes banging their parts against one another are real in a way the dinosaurs of "Jurassic Park" never were. And I don't know whether Hyams intended this to be "cute" or not, but the two diminutive military helicopters acts like individuals. They fly in single file and when they find something interesting, they hover and turn face to face, as if having a conversation. When they make a "decision", they practically nod in agreement, then they turn in the same direction and fly off together again. They do this several times. It's like watching an animated cartoon on Saturday morning TV.
Goldsmith's score is bound to the genre, but it's a good one, and you can hear echoes of "Chinatown" in the thrumming of piano wires.
A very mixed bag but worth seeing. (I kind of like movies in which people get lost in deserts.) Evidently Hyams had tried to put such a film together earlier but wasn't able to do so until after Watergate. (Kids, "Watergate" is the name of a Washington scandal that led to a president's resignation in 1974. This movie came out the following year. PS: That would be 1975.) Of course, now, in 2007, I don't think Hyams or anybody else would have much trouble.
They make it into the middle of a wasteland before their airplane runs out of fuel and crash lands. Then they stride off in three different directions in hopes that one of them will find a phone booth, a police station, a hospital, a newspaper, or a Starbucks coffee shop.
A grueling trek ensues. O. J. and Waterston are picked up and -- well, we don't find out what happened to them except that they disappear. Let's hope they didn't disappear to the same place that nosy technician disappeared to when he twigged on the ruse at Command Control.
Hyams hasn't written what anyone would call a tight plot. The faked jump from the landing module to the surface of "Mars" ("We make this leap in the name of all mankind") ought to be one of, if not THE, most gripping moment in the story. It raises all sorts of questions. Who wrote their phony dialog from Mars? ("The surface seems powdery.") Who dreamed up the Martian landscape? But it lasts no more than five minutes and the backdrop and lighting look as slapped together as in a "Dragnet" episode.
The dialog is no help either. "This is a good, old-fashioned, American, can-do, red-white-and-blue favor I'm asking." (Something like that.) The characters are stereotypes. Brolin is the sober commander of the three. Waterston provides the comic relief, which isn't very comic. O. J. has no lines to speak of -- just as well.
Hyams does much better with the action scenes. There's an out-of-control speeding car with Eliot Gould, as a meddlesome reporter, behind the wheel. No brakes, he can't shut the ignition off, the parking brake doesn't work, he can't down shift, an open drawbridge looms in the offing, and -- well, you know how it goes by now. It's exciting. It would have been just as exciting if the camera hadn't been under cranked to speed up the motion artificially. And you can pretty much tell this is a post-"French Connection" film because a camera is mounted on the speeding car at about one foot above the zipping pavement.
Motion is accelerated during the airplane chase too, where it REALLY doesn't belong, but the chase itself -- two armed government helicopters after a beat-up old biplane, swooping down among the desert canyons, looping around crags, without CGIs -- is thrilling. And obviously dangerous. The airplanes banging their parts against one another are real in a way the dinosaurs of "Jurassic Park" never were. And I don't know whether Hyams intended this to be "cute" or not, but the two diminutive military helicopters acts like individuals. They fly in single file and when they find something interesting, they hover and turn face to face, as if having a conversation. When they make a "decision", they practically nod in agreement, then they turn in the same direction and fly off together again. They do this several times. It's like watching an animated cartoon on Saturday morning TV.
Goldsmith's score is bound to the genre, but it's a good one, and you can hear echoes of "Chinatown" in the thrumming of piano wires.
A very mixed bag but worth seeing. (I kind of like movies in which people get lost in deserts.) Evidently Hyams had tried to put such a film together earlier but wasn't able to do so until after Watergate. (Kids, "Watergate" is the name of a Washington scandal that led to a president's resignation in 1974. This movie came out the following year. PS: That would be 1975.) Of course, now, in 2007, I don't think Hyams or anybody else would have much trouble.