Ghosts World

Ghosts of Mars

by Robert C. Cumbow, www.cinemonkey.com

es, I know that the movie is promoted as—and officially titled—John Carpenter's Ghosts of Mars. But while I am not opposed to the possessory credit—especially in the case of an auteur as bona fide as John Carpenter—I have never accepted the marketing hubris of merging the byline into the title. The one instance I can think of where the name of the director actually belongs in the film's title is Wes Craven's New Nightmare—because the title legitimately describes the subject of the film. Maybe an argument could be made for Kurosawa's Dreams. But as long as I am the one dealing with it, the name of the new John Carpenter film is Ghosts of Mars.

Of course there is a sense in which the "ghosts" of the title are, in fact, John Carpenter's. For Ghosts of Mars is like nothing so much as a rhapsody on themes and images from Carpenter's entire oeuvre to date. For that reason, the film is likely to be of more interest to already-avowed John Carpenter aficionados than to the broader range of Friday-night moviegoers.

Indeed, I can't help wondering exactly what market Carpenter was aiming at with this new film. He seems to have set out to flaunt his renowned B-film sensibility by giving the film (sans possessory terms) the most B-film title he has yet devised—certainly more "B" for my money, than Assault on Precinct 13 or Escape from New York or even Big Trouble in Little China. He's also assembled a true B-film cast of unknowns, little-knowns and B-knowns (Ice Cube, Pam Greer, Natasha Henstridge), and has given his film a spare, under-populated, low-budget look consistent with his commitment (since the early '90s) to independent work and his general rejection of big-studio projects.

Maybe the market he was aiming for was exemplified in the two guys I overheard in the menís room after the Seattle preview screening:

"Now that was more like it."

"Yeah Movies have been too restrained in the last couple years."

"Right In this one limbs lopped off, heads lopped off."

"Yeah, that was more like it."

But Ghost of Mars isn't just a gore fest (in fact, as gore fests go, it's comparatively tame, even if movies have been too restrained in recent months). And it doesn't seem to be pitched to the Troma/Trancas crowd (for one thing, Miss Henstridge stays pretty much dressed for the entire film—atypically for her, but typically for Carpenter). It may be that Carpenter was really aiming the film at the inner circle of his fans—or perhaps making it only to please himself. Certainly no film since Prince of Darkness has seemed quite so concerted an effort to sum up all the themes and visions that have fueled his career to date.

Spotting those images, in-jokes, self-references, and variations on themes is fun in itself. But Ghosts of Mars isn't half the film Prince of Darkness was. It's a lightweight—apparently intentionally so—returning to the elemental simplicity of an Assault on Precinct 13 rather than the metaphysical importance of a Prince of Darkness or an In the Mouth of Madness.

Sure, thereís a metaphysical dimension to Ghosts of Mars—look at the title, for gosh sakes. A mining operation on the red planet has inadvertently broken open a sealed compound that contains—in invisible, ethereal form—the whole culture, malevolence, and savage self-defense of an apparently vanished race of aboriginal Martians. Exhaled into the atmosphere of Mars, this force enters alien intruders at will and causes them to destroy one another, and ultimately themselves.

ut if this sounds like another interesting variation on the "We are the Martians!" theme of Nigel Kneale's Quatermass and the Pit (filmed as Five Million Years to Earth in 1966), it doesn't go any farther than simply sounding like one. None of the provocative teleological and theodical questions of Five Million Years to Earth or Prince of Darkness haunt this film. Instead, it is a simple, direct, down-to-Mars retelling of one of Carpenter's favorite stories: the thrown-together team of tough guys and not-so-tough guys, defending a weakening stronghold against a menace from the outer darkness. Three films Carpenter admires—the original The Thing, Rio Bravo, and Night of the Living Dead—inspired him to run his own variation on this theme in his justly celebrated pre-Halloween effort Assault on Precinct 13

Ghosts of Mars is essentially Assault on Precinct 13 with a more outlandish setting and premise. Otherwise, it's the same story, throwing a ragtag band of both seasoned and rookie cops in with a fistful of hardened criminals on a failed escape attempt, kneading them into a cohesive unit to combat the other-worldly force that's bigger—and worse—than all of them. And that's where the film goes wrong. In Ghosts of Mars the stakes somehow never seem very high. Maybe it's because we don't care enough about the characters. Maybe it's because the loss of a colony on Mars never seems as important a threat as the loss of a chunk of California real estate and a whole social order (Assault on Precinct 13, The Fog, Big Trouble in Little China), the loss of faith in our sense of right (Halloween, Escape from New York, Christine, Starman, Escape from L.A., Vampires), or the obliteration of our very humanity (The Thing, Prince of Darkness, They Live, Village of the Damned, In the Mouth of Madness).

For whatever reason, a movie that rings sweeping changes on many of Carpenter's most provocative and stimulating themes, only to support a story of how a sexy cop and a tough criminal bury their differences, fight cute, and become the last best hope of human life on Mars just doesn't fit on the top shelf of our Carpenter case.

Nevertheless, let it not be said that this is "same old" Carpenter. He does some very interesting things with Ghosts of Mars. His compositions are as clean and thoughtfully designed as ever. He remains a master of the meaningful spatial relationships and suggestive camera movements that critics celebrated in his earliest films. His night and day-for-night work reminds us once again how—from Assault on Precinct 13 and Halloween forward—Carpenter has always made literal darkness a palpable correlative for the metaphoric darkness of the soul. It's also a reminder that, on the purely technical level, Carpenter remains one of the few filmmakers who shows us things in the dark, powerful, fearsome things—contrasted with, for example, Ridley Scott, whose dark compositions only leave us scratching our heads and wondering what it was we were supposed to have thought we saw.

Even more interesting is Carpenter's use, in Ghosts of Mars, of a series of what lit majors like to call "nested narratives." In a short prologue a voice over, directly echoing the opening to Escape from New York, tells us that "Something that had been buried for centuries has been uncovered." (Think The Thing, Prince of Darkness, In the Mouth of Madness.) The film-proper begins with the convening of a board of inquiry. As the police officer who is the subject of the inquiry begins her story, we lapse into a flashback. But each time she relates something that was told to her by someone else, we lapse into that character's point of view. This experimental approach to narrative structure gives Ghosts of Mars the feeling of a series of stories within stories—some of them, Rashomon-like, giving us variant points of view of the same events.

ut when all is said and done, and we come out of the flashback and into "real time," the upshot of the film is too trivial to warrant its use of a narrative line as sophisticated and complex as that of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein or Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. One only wishes that there were something in the theme or vision of the film to actually justify its intriguing structural explorations. But that's the way it is with Ghosts of Mars: There's a lot of great compositions, snappy writing, stylish playing—it's a great ride. But as Carpenter himself cautions us within the first few seconds of the film, the train's on autopilot. We're pretty much on our own to make of it what we can.

Robert C. Cumbow is the author of Order in the Universe: The Films of John Carpenter, recently published in a revised Second Edition by Scarecrow Press.

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