Some would argue that John Carpenter is a horror movie and sci fi genius. With groundbreaking films like Halloween and Escape From New York, the director does have a certain credibility when he puts his stamp on a movie. But after the alien fantasy Starman in 1984, Carpenter’s films have deteriorated into television-movie fodder. Ghosts Of Mars is one of his weakest efforts and the major reason is that Carpenter and others have done this same kind of film before and better. Its lone saving grace is some action scenes reminiscent of Starship Troopers. The Mars Police Force patrols the red planet and keeps law and order in the human colonies. Natasha Henstridge (Species) plays Melanie Ballard, a cop who is sent to an uninhabited part of the planet to apprehend Desolation Williams (Ice Cube) who is on the lam. But her main problems are not with capturing Desolation but rather fighting Martian apparitions that have been unleashed because of extensive mineral exploration by human inhabitants. Essentially, Ghosts of Mars is a space western with alien ghosts thrown in. It is Carpenter’s Assault On Precinct 13 meets Carpenter’s Vampires meets Poltergeist, all of which are superior films.
If you love cheesy, violent space warfare flicks, then you will enjoy Ghosts Of Mars. But for the rest of us, it should never have been made. Ice Cube has a weak role and he makes the worst of it. Of all the gangsta rap artists-cum-actors, he seems to be the one with the most credibility. Roles in Boyz N the Hood, Three Kings and Friday turned him into a big attraction but Ice Cube cannot take B-grade material and do much with it. Far better results, at least for Carpenter, come when good actors make the best of his lame scripts like James Woods’ excellent turn in the otherwise pathetic Vampires. Henstridge, like Dina Mayer in Starship Troopers, makes for great eye candy out in space but just perpetuates the jaw-dropping blonde versus exploding aliens genre that has worn itself and viewers out.
That said, the makeup wizardry of Kurtzman, Becker and Nicotero is always fantastic. Long a staple of Carpenter’s films and other horror movies, these three sure know how to make the ugly look really gruesome. Instead of the blood splattered wasteland that they won awards for in Vampires, they transform Mars into a ghost story battleground. Because of this strength, it’s the technical aspects of the film in which I try to find merit – and that’s about the film’s only hope, because the story and the acting are not very good.
Although they are clearly the bad guys, I sympathized with the ghosts of Mars. In 2025, we have destroyed parts of our own planet and now inhabit the planets of others. Naturally, the Martians are going to defend what is rightfully theirs. I think a far better movie would have been the third instalment of Kurt Russell in “Escape From Mars” in which he is imprisoned in a Martian compound because we have simply run out of room for criminals on Earth. But what we have instead is a film that is not scary but gruesome, not logical but told in a series of annoying flashbacks, and worst of all, not good versus evil, but characters we don’t really like versus ghosts who are trying to defend their planet. You’d be well advised to miss this one and stick to better horror/ sci fi/ space travel movies like Alien and Army Of Darkness. For better John Carpenter movies, check out The Thing and Starman.
