By Joshua Tyler
| Published
America loves convenience. After all, we’re the culture that invented the cell phone, the 24-hour ATM, and my most beloved, the remote control. In 2001, in his final effort as a filmmaker, iconic director John Carpenter took our love of convenience too far.
Ghosts of Mars stars 90s VHS rental icon Natasha Henstridge as a tough-as-nails, pill-popping, Martian cop, sent with her squadron to retrieve ‘Demolition’ Williams (Ice Cube) from a remote mining town for trial back home. When she and her comrades, appropriately dubbed ‘The Commander’ (screen icon Pam Grier), ‘The Rookies,’ and the guy with the cool accent (a not-yet-famous Jason Statham) discover the town’s residents slaughtered, they are forced to team up with Williams to escape from the remaining residents’ head-chopping, alien-possessed clutches.
Filled with a lovely overuse of storytelling flashbacks, flash-sideways, and viewpoint changes, Ghosts of Mars is a hapless mishmash of poorly constructed dialogue and ill-conceived action sequences. The only thing keeping this film from becoming an incomprehensible mess is the sheer idiotic simplicity of its story. Ripped straight from the pages of a 1970s zombie movie, Ghosts leaps from one convenient moment to the next, stopping only to kill the most convenient characters to lose.
Attempts at character interaction and development are rare and forced. Most of these moments come off as Kwik-E-Mart wisdom, dispensed heartily around the Slushee machine of life by the even-tempered streetwise hand of Ice Cube. With a gun in one hand and a dynamite cap in the other, Cube reminisces about his street life, comparing the zombie-stomping fun to ‘Me and my brother when we was kids.’ Apparently, crime in the Bronx has gotten so bad that the residents have actually taken to ritually decapitating one another for entertainment.
But, even in the film’s darkest moments, fate conveniently lends a hand, supplying heavily armored transportation and easily accessible rifles and dynamite. Yes, in the future, man may travel to space and conquer Mars, but nothing beats a good stick of TNT. As we all know, every police station, past, present, or future, keeps a healthy supply of dynamite on hand.
Characters die, heads are lopped off, but they were only supporting roles anyway, so why should we care? As long as you have plenty of narcotics, immunity is guaranteed. Eventually, though, even the most well-trained zombie alien gets a bit uppity and needs to be taught a lesson.
What better way than by sacrificing a few minor characters to a convenient nuclear detonation, killing anything the machine guns can’t handle. Explosions are fun. And even if the nukes don’t get them, the conveniently placed dynamite packs on the train stolen from the set of The Road Warrior certainly will.
Ghosts of Mars defines itself when our cop’s tribunal pronounces, ‘Is that all you have to tell us?’ Indeed, this was the place where master filmmaker John Carpenter ran out of things to say and instead decided to use whatever was convenient to tell a ridiculously bad story.
GHOSTS OF MARS REVIEW SCORE
Ghosts Of Mars Ended John Carpenter’s Career
Released on August 24, 2001, the film grossed just $14 million worldwide against a $28 million budget, marking it a significant box office disappointment. Worst of all, nearly everyone hated it. Ghosts of Mars holds a 23% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Audiences were similarly unimpressed, awarding it a C− grade on CinemaScore.
This was the last movie directed by the man who brought unforgettable films like The Thing, Halloween, Big Trouble in Little China, and Escape from New York. After Ghosts of Mars, Carpenter moved into the music business. Music was always one of his passions, it’s why the sound in his movies is always so unique. It’s the perfect way for an icon to spend his later years. Now, do your best to forget about Ghosts of Mars.
