{"id":16789,"date":"2024-09-25T21:00:56","date_gmt":"2024-09-26T01:00:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/?p=16789"},"modified":"2024-09-23T16:01:16","modified_gmt":"2024-09-23T20:01:16","slug":"ghosts-of-mars-2001-john-carpenter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/archives\/16789","title":{"rendered":"Ghosts of Mars (2001, John Carpenter)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I had rewatched <em>O Brother<\/em> and <em>La Samourai<\/em> the same week I saw a Rohmer movie and two by Claire Denis, so needed to counterbalance all that good art somehow.  Between the hokey miniatures, the CG projectiles, instru-metal soundtrack, <em>Star Trek<\/em>-caliber fight scenes, the dodgy editing and cliche dialogue it does have all the marks of a Bad Movie, but the lead baddie&#8217;s babytalk gibberish barking has stuck with me over the years, and &#8220;<a href=\"\/journal\/archives\/16237\">Hellraiser In Space<\/a>&#8221; is one of my favorite genres, and it&#8217;s a John Carpenter movie about a group of cops and criminals who come under <a href=\"\/journal\/archives\/16450\">assault in a precinct<\/a>, so perhaps it&#8217;s actually good?  I&#8217;m here to tell you that it&#8217;s not good.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/journal\/image24\/mars3.jpg\"><\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/journal\/image24\/mars2.jpg\"><\/p>\n<p>Natasha &#8220;<em>Species<\/em>&#8221; Henstridge becomes team leader after Pam Grier is beheaded, assisted by rookie Jason Statham.  The team&#8217;s mission before getting derailed by alien assault was to escort dangerous prisoner Ice Cube to a different facility, but of course it becomes necessary for cops and crooks to team up for survival against the invaders &#8211; who are not aliens really, but self-mutilating zombie humans a la <em>Return of the Living Dead 3<\/em> led by the Marilyn Mansonesque Richard Cetrone (the merman in <em><a href=\"\/journal\/archives\/7551\">Cabin in the Woods<\/a><\/em>), possessed by the spirits of the planet&#8217;s native inhabitants as a defense against colonizers.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/journal\/image24\/mars1.jpg\"><\/p>\n<p>Christoph Huber in Cinema Scope:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Carpenter goes for an ambitious but not entirely successful mash-up of his earlier works &#8230; The film&#8217;s otherwise standard action template is given weirdly dreamlike shape through flashback-within-flashback narration and surreal superimpositions, to the point that it feels like a dirge for a type of filmmaking gone out of fashion. Even the KISS-style monster makeup confirms that nothing has changed since the &#8217;80s, the red hell of Martian future just an apocalyptic projection of the capitalist wasteland we&#8217;ve been speeding into since the days of Reaganomics.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I had rewatched O Brother and La Samourai the same week I saw a Rohmer movie and two by Claire Denis, so needed to counterbalance all that good art somehow. Between the hokey miniatures, the CG projectiles, instru-metal soundtrack, Star Trek-caliber fight scenes, the dodgy editing and cliche dialogue it does have all the marks [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[369,110,1612,57,1709,1298,294,100],"class_list":["post-16789","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie","tag-2000s","tag-ghosts","tag-jason-statham","tag-john-carpenter","tag-mars","tag-pam-grier","tag-trains","tag-zombies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16789","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16789"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16789\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16807,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16789\/revisions\/16807"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16789"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16789"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16789"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}