(2001. dir: John Carpenter) OK. We've settled Mars. Mining camps, mostly. We've jerryrigged a certain amount of earth-like atmosphere and set up makeshift villages for the workers, established a running train. We also woke up something long dormant, a cloud of entities which travels like a thick red dust-storm and enters in through the ear, possessing the humans and turning them into Reavers. (If you're unclear as to what a Reaver is, watch Firefly episode three, "Bushwhacked".) The movie's Token Scientist, played by Joanna Cassidy (all the power-holders in this civilization of the future are women), along with the ranking officer (Natasha Henstridge, who has her own encounter with possession but beats it by taking drugs), together suss out that these are the ghosts of a long-dead, fish-faced, warrior race who are bent on genocidal destruction of any invading entity: in this case, the human race.
It's an unabashed Western, complete with posse, band of outlaws, an ambushed train, and a wrathful indigenous people being slaughtered for their land ("This is about one thing," says Henstridge's Lieutenant in her St. Crispin's Day speech. "Dominion. This is not their planet anymore.") Carpenter gets to play in some of his favorite sandboxes here: he takes the post-apocalyptic punk-chic of Escape from New York and ramps it up to full volume (a bra made out of severed human hands, anyone?) and restages Assault at Precinct 13 on the red planet, with cops and crooks teaming up to fight... well, ghosts. And, because these beings are incorporeal, and because once you kill the host they're going to find the next available ear to jump into, the killing doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Particularly once our band of heroes is safe on the train out of there and Henstridge's Lieutenant decides they need to STOP AND GO BACK to try and destroy the menace by MacGyvering a nuclear bomb ("a small one," granted) out of the nuclear power plant. Why Cassidy's Token Scientist doesn't explain that ghosts probably aren't going to be affected by a nuclear blast, but they, as humans, sure as hell are, is one of many, many weak points in the script.
In the end, it's not what matters. This is a buddy-action flick, with Henstridge and Ice Cube as the unlikely buddies, and it's some fun in that respect, although Ice Cube is so babyfaced it's hard to be truly impressed by his tough-guy attitude, and it would have been a whole lot more fun if the two of them had some kind of chemistry. Or, indeed, if Henstridge shared a chemistry with Jason Statham, who has an interesting turn in what would normally be the cute-girl role, fetching and carrying, opening locks, making google-eyes at his Lieutenant. The best part about the whole movie is the gender-reversal aspect, in fact, and it would have been doubly great if the Ice Cube role (James "Desolation" Williams) had been given to a woman as well.
For all the interesting casting (Clea Duvall, Pam Grier, Rodney A. Grant), it never sparks entirely into life. The world itself (apparently the whole thing was filmed in a rock quarry in Mexico) never feels true, and the actors never seem to truly inhabit it. Coupled with the howling miscalculations at the heart of the story, it makes for some rough going. Where it succeeds, it succeeds by the fun we have in spite of all that.
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