An uneasy, hippified version of a cowboys and Indians shoot-’em-up, John Carpenter’s Ghosts of Mars is an exhausted shade of the once-hip director’s oeuvre, baldly stealing from his Assault on Precinct 13 before partially resurrecting later works The Fog, Escape from N.Y. & L.A., The Thing, and even They Live in the focus on an interracial pair hooking up to kick alien ass. It sounds like an agreeable enough concoction, especially when one considers the presence of the lovely Natasha Henstridge in a tight sweater perspiring alongside cult personalities Pam Grier, Ice Cube, and Snatch’s Jason Statham, but Ghosts of Mars is a rudderless enterprise that doesn’t know what it’s doing and bores while doing it. The most disturbing thing about an aggressively tame production is the suspicion that the John Carpenter who used to make interesting socio-political genre films has been taken over by one of his own mindless zombie Martians.
Henstridge plays Melanie Ballard, a cop in a matriarchal Mars society (giving lie to the pop truism that women are from Venus). She’s sent, as are grizzled vet Helena (Pam Grier), lascivious suitor Jericho (Statham), and green rookie Bashira (Clea DuVall), to collect and transfer gangster supervillain Snake Plisskin--I mean, James ’’Desolation’’ Williams (Ice Cube)--from a red planet mining town. Told in flashback (and flashback within flashback within tedious shifts in point-of-view), Ghosts of Mars establishes that the bad guys have been infected with some kind of body-snatching phantom spore/dust (that does not affect everyone, I guess), that terraforming has made the atmosphere 80% breathable, and that an entirely non-existent wind is responsible for spreading the contagion.
There’s some mumbo-jumbo jibber-jabber about ghosts of Mars wanting to destroy any ’’invaders, ’’ leading Melanie to utter, with no trace of irony, the white man’s battle-cry: ’’It’s ours now.’’ The actual villains, all looking like extras from a Gwar video, alternate between screaming and warbling unintelligibly in an idioglossic patois, so clearly meant to be the crazed, murderous Indians of an antiquated western serial. I was actually disappointed to note the lack of a smoke-signal intrigue and a circling of a wagon train--but not as disappointed as I was to note that the bad guys are clearly meant to be the crazed, murderous Indians of an antiquated western serial.
Ghosts of Mars is a rote, clunky, enfeebled picture that starts out agreeably enough, with the intriguing suggestion of a matriarchal ruling structure and the bare inklings of yet another satiric exposition of Carpenter’s stoned eco-sympathy and liberal racial outrage. The only thing that really works in the film is Carpenter’s moody electronica score, which almost, but not quite, fools us into believing that something scary or suspenseful is going on. There is no attention paid to character development and even less, if that’s possible, to plot coherence. Come to think of it, once the credits roll, it’s difficult for one to remember how time watching Ghosts of Mars was spent at all. When the most memorable scene in your action/horror/sci-fi thriller is a brief ending shot of Henstridge in grey institutional underwear, you know you’ve got problems.
Usually in science fiction films, problems arise when internal rules are violated. Ghosts of Mars, however, doesn’t seem to have any rules to begin with; it’s a chaotic mish-mash of ill-framed excuses for extended and dull fight scenes, most of them shot in extreme slow-motion and without any trace of the exuberance of, say, Carpenter’s Big Trouble in Little China and its alleyway deathmatch. Ghosts of Mars has a couple of relatively bloodless beheadings, a trio of unconvincing throat slashings, and an execution-by-hubcap that is not nearly so interesting as the fact of the hubcaps themselves being on a remote mining colony. Although I enjoyed a few of the make-up effects (particularly an extra with what appears to be knives through her cheeks), the film is unfrightening, unsuspenseful, not gory enough, and scripted by the thing that consumed John Carpenter: a moron at least twenty-five years past its prime.