It’s 2020, and the party is held for Luke Graham (Don Cheadle), commander of the first manned mission to Mars, set to blast off in a few short days. Good friends banter, share, laugh, love and tell each other things they most certainly already know, for the benefit of those wonderful people out there in the dark. Middle-aged men in Hawaiian shirts and their pretty wives yuk it up as credits for the ensemble cast appear at the exact moment the actor emerges on screen. The streamers drift down onto children at a backyard barbecue on an unconvincing old Hollywood style set, complete with bolted-down trees and trucked-in dirt. Mission to Mars opens with one of the most cynical cinematic jokes in De Palma’s career: a shot of a toy rocket that explodes, looking just like the space shuttle Challenger disaster, except with festive streamers instead of fatalities. Mission to Mars was ostensibly meant as a sci-fi callback to 1960s-era concepts of peace, love and togetherness, but instead became a beautiful and soulless fiasco, bulging with stiff dialogue and product placement. By 1996’s Mission: Impossible, he was taking the undeniable easy road, pilfering the most celebrated and well known cinematic heist scene as his own, adding nothing new save a stark white palette and overprocessed Hollywood heartthrob.Īmidst what appeared to be signs of artistic burnout, the old De Palma surfaced briefly in his next film Snake Eyes, but by Mission to Mars (2000), De Palma was so tired he barely had any fight left in him, and what he did have manifested as long-withheld cynicism.
They were no longer homage or reflected joy of the craft, but were included only because De Palma knew it was expected of him.
At some point in De Palma’s career, his trademark borrowing of themes and scenes ceased reflecting a respect for directors who came before him.
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