The Martian Chronicles
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Movie Reviews of The Martian Chronicles
Movie Review: BRING BACK THE OLD SCI-FI
Summary: 5 Stars
Ray Bradbury was truly before his time. The Martian Chronicles keeps the viewers interest and probes the imagination..Movie Review: Classic Science Fiction
Summary: 5 Stars
I love this mini series! It is science fiction at its best.It makes you ask yourself "What If ?"Movie Review: Seriously Retro
Summary: 4 Stars
Seriously Retro!
I've a soft spot for this one, having watched it the first time around in 1980 (which is when it reached the UK). No doubt that it's the power of Ray Bradbury's original stories that carries it.
In a sense, you've got to switch off your brain to enjoy this. Or perhaps I should say you should switch of your Left Brain: the logical, analytical part. For example, we all know now that people can't breathe on the surface of Mars without space suits. Let it go! If you can't do that then don't bother with this DVD. Switch on your Right Brain (imagination) and you've a chance of enjoying this... just a chance though!
First, let's get the bad stuff out of the way. The special effects are bad. I know that they didn't have CGI etc then, but this was 2 years after Star Wars, or in a TV sense, a year after Battlestar Galactica. I'd have expected a major US network to have at least bettered Dr Who or Blake's 7 standards; but they didn't.
The pace is very slow. Sometimes that lets the stories unfold at a natural pace, but a lot of the time, you're tapping your fingers, thinking "get on with it!". In this regard, Bradbury was scathing in his comments at the time: "it's boring, they've made it boring", he said. And he had no doubt where the blame lay, saying that Michael Anderson had directed it "underwater". He wasn't wrong.
And often, the acting doesn't help. Rock Hudson has never been the most exciting actor in the world, and he's particularly dull here. Sure, he does integrity and trustworthiness just fine, but there were times that I felt his character needed a little more fire in his belly and Hudson doesn't provide it. The rest of the cast is variable, to put it mildy. At one end, Bernie Casey is just fine as Spender, and Nicholas Hammond, best remembered as a rather plastic 70s Spiderman, is equally good as the leader of the second expedition. At the other end, Roddy McDowell is just plain irritating as Father Stone.
Now the good stuff!
The sets are great, and the Martians themselves are wonderfully "other wordly", helped by the fact that they are used sparingly.
Plotwise, there's some good changes been made. I know that people here have referred to Bradbury's work as a "novel" but it's not: it's actually a collection of loosely connected short stories. Screen writer Richard Matheson sensibly drops some of the more unworkable original stories, such as "Way Up In The Middle Of The Air" (negroes in the American South climb into a spaceship to escape their white oppressors) and also the original second expedition story, where the earthlings' "first contact" is with a Martian lunatic asylum!.
His masterstroke is to unify the work by beefing up the role of Colonel John Wilder (Hudson) so that he appears in nearly all the stories. (In Bradbury's book, Wilder appeared in only two of them). In one story, this change actually manages to improve on the original. I refer to the story (spoiler ahead!) of the Martian who changes shape, according to the wants and desires of the human person that's nearest to him. In the mini series, the Martian ends by changing back to his actual form, because he bumps into Wilder (not in this story in Bradbury's book). Wilder is the only person on Mars that actually wants to meet a real, live Martian.
A sentimental 4 stars.
Movie Review: Taking It Back
Summary: 4 Stars
I actually saw this mini series when it first came out in 1980, and upon re-watching it last week I was surprised by just how much of it I could remember (and, honestly, how much of it had an impact on me).
As other reviewers have pointed out, these stories move at much different pace than most sci-fi movies/tv. The special effects and the music hasn't aged all that well, but I don't really think they are a huge detriment.
I think that the pacing is deliberate because these are fairly cereberal stories, and the special effects are balanced out by the settings. Mars is a very bleak place, with no real trees, and no particular animal life. The pre-fab buildings of the settlers look right, as well as the way some settlers want the interiors of their buildings to look modern, and some want them to look more like an old Earth home.
The quality of the individual vignettes vary, the strongest ones more than make up for the weaker ones. The third expedition is probably the strongest of them, and it sets the stage for most of the rest of the overall plot.
One of the things that jumped out at me was that Wilder spends most of his life on Mars wondering if Spender really was Spender. And Rock Hudson does a great job in this as a man who is trying to keep the colony going, and hoping to find Martians, and wanting to know just exactly what happened with Spender, and bearing up under the horrible events he's witnessed (the total destruction of Earth, the decimation of the Martians).
Parkhill is a great character-- I know a guy just like him. The kind of guy who you'd really want on your side in a firefight, but also the kind of guy who, with a planet full of gold and uranium and other precious metals, whose best plan to get rich is by opening a restuarant. His goofy, over-enthusiastic behavior makes his realization about what happens on Earth that much more powerful.
It is perhaps the unanswered questions that are the best. Why do a race of telepaths wear masks? To hide their intention, or to broadcast them? Why do the Martians give Parkhill half the planet... who was to get the other half. And why Parkhill and not someone like Wilder? And was Spender really Spender the whole time?
Movie Review: YOU SEE NOTHING BUT YOUR DREAMS
Summary: 4 Stars
When I first watched this movie some 20 + years ago, I turned it off. The science in the movie was just that bad. In the 1940's when the book was originally written, it was passable, now it is nearly cult classic folly. When you add to it the slow moving drama and mediocre acting from a 1970's has been cast, it is a turn off.
However, much of science fiction is moralistic, making a statement about human society in a way that shelters the author from criticism. In that regard, this movie was good science fiction. There are several major theme points. These are brought out by the opening flashback scenes shown at the beginning of each episode. The theme is that people are selfish. They "see nothing but their own dreams." They can't respect other people's point of view. This is shown in the colonization of America, er ah Mars, and in politics both domestic and on the world stage until we bring ourselves to ruin. A Martian eventually dies as everybody wants him to be a different person.
At one point two monks are talking when one says, "Can't you see the human in the inhuman?" A theme reference to the human aspect of inhumanity. Other memorable lines are "I finally get to meet a Martian and I shot him." And when the Martian gives Rock Hudson the secret of living, "Anyone with eyes can see the way to live."
By the third episode, Earth and Mars are nearly completely dead. A man named Benjamin is alone and manages to meet Bernadette Peters, perhaps the last woman in existence. In a dark comedy moment, Bernadette is more concerned about how she looks, even though there is no one to look at her, than say the destruction of civilization. She didn't go back to Earth because they wouldn't let her take all of her clothes. At this point in the film I felt the producers missed the opportunity of doing a complete re-write of the script, turning it into a classic dark comedy. However for the sake of purity to the book they didn't do that. In that regard, the movie also contained occasional needless narration.
After Benjamin decides he would rather live alone than with Bernadette Peters, the movie digresses into hokey when the subliminal message of the movie becomes too overt. I think a Coen Brothers remake with George Clooney in the Rock Hudson role would be fantastic.