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Mission To Mars (2000)
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Eadie
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PostPosted: Fri Oct 24, 2014 11:31 am    Post subject: Mission To Mars (2000) Reply with quote



Wikipedia says about Mission To Mars:

In 2020, the Mars I spacecraft, en route to planet Mars, is commanded by Luke Graham with fellow astronauts Nicholas Willis, Sergei Kirov, and Ren??e Cot??. Upon arrival, the team discovers a crystalline formation in the Cydonia region, by which they suspect an extrusion from a subsurface geothermal column of water, useful to future human colonization. After reporting this to the World Space Station, they hear a strange sound on their communications system, which they assume to be interference from their planetary rover. While they scan the formation with radar, a large vortex kills Nicholas, Sergei, and Ren??e.

After the vortex subsides, a large humanoid face is exposed in the adjacent mountain. ISS, having receiving Luke's message, a second ship is readied for a rescue mission: the Mars II containing Commander Woody Blake, Co-Commander Jim McConnell, and mission specialists Terri Fisher and Phil Ohlmyer. As the ship enters Mars orbit, micrometeors breach the hull. During repair, the external fuel tanks are overlooked, causing a leak and later explosion. The crew then board the REMO ("Resupply Module") orbiting Mars. Tethered to the others, Woody launches himself at the module, but is unable to properly land on it. Terri tries to rescue Woody, but knowing she would run out of fuel before reaching him, Woody removes his helmet, killing himself to save her.

When the survivors arrive on the surface of Mars, they find Luke living on the produce of a greenhouse, whereupon he reveals that the crystalline structure looks humanoid, and that the noise represents a map of human DNA in XYZ coordinates, but missing a pair of chromosomes. To complete the sequence, the crew dispatches a robotic rover to reproduce the completed signal. Following the transmission, an opening appears in the side of the mountain, which Jim, Terri, and Luke enter, while Phil remains at the repaired emergency return vehicle with orders to launch, with or without them, at the agreed time.

The opening seals behind them, disrupting radio communication with Phil, and a three-dimensional projection depicts the planet Mars, covered with water, being struck by a large asteroid and rendered uninhabitable. A Martian then reveals that the natives of Mars evacuated their world in spacecraft, whereof one landed on Earth to create humans, who could one day land on Mars and be recognized as descendants. An invitation is offered to one astronaut to follow the Martians to their new home. Jim accepts the invitation and is launched in an oxygenated capsule, while the others return to Phil, and subsequently to Earth.


Cast

Gary Sinise as Jim McConnell
Tim Robbins as Woody Blake
Don Cheadle as Luke Graham
Connie Nielsen as Terri Fisher
Jerry O'Connell as Phil Ohlmyer
Kim Delaney as Maggie McConnell
Peter Outerbridge as Sergei Kirov
Kavan Smith as Nicholas Willis
Jill Teed as Ren??e Cot??
Elise Neal as Debra Graham
Robert Bailey Jr. as Bobby Graham
Taylor Jones as Daniel Lederman
Armin Mueller-Stahl as Ramier Beck

Directed by Brian De Palma

Produced by Tom Jacobson

Screenplay by Jim Thomas, John Thomas and Graham Yost

Story by Lowell Cannon, Jim Thomas and John Thomas

Music by Ennio Morricone

A wonderful movie in the tradition of 2001: A Space Odyssey and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which for some stupid reason the critics hated. (My Godfather calls them "Cry-Tics" because they whine and cry about everything while sucking the life-blood of the movie. I agree with him.)

Four things that stand out for me are the Martian;




Their "number base 8" countdown;



Their launch chamber combined with and eidoranium;







And the eidoranium itself:



The term "eidoranium" is a word coined by Robert A. Heinlein in Citizen of the Galaxy which combines planetarium and 'eidos', Greek for seen and used in the phrase eidetic memory. There are two types in science fiction stories; the Solar System type used in Mission To Mars and the Galactic type seen in Prometheus:




Most older stories called this a galacto-view.


Last edited by Eadie on Sun May 31, 2020 2:13 pm; edited 1 time in total
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Bud Brewster
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PostPosted: Thu Nov 06, 2014 6:10 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

This was a fairly ambitious and imaginative movie, and I liked parts of it. There wasn't any part of it I really disliked. It just didn't exactly knock my socks off. But I did like the fact that it made use of the Face on Mars as part of the story.

What I've been wondering about for years it that other face on Mars, this one —



-- and the amazing resemblance it has to this one!
Shocked


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Last edited by Bud Brewster on Fri Jul 15, 2022 1:45 pm; edited 3 times in total
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Bud Brewster
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PostPosted: Tue Oct 18, 2016 11:35 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

__________________________________

The trailer for this one certainly makes it look interesting.


__________________________________

_________________ Mission to Mars - trailer


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Bud Brewster
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PostPosted: Mon Jan 28, 2019 5:27 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

________________________________

This a wonderful documentary about the making of this movie! Very Happy
________________________________


Behind The Scenes: The Making of Mission to Mars - Visions of Mars


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Gord Green
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PostPosted: Mon Jan 28, 2019 8:09 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

As much as I tried to dislike this movie I couldn't help falling in love with it.

Gary Sinese is marvelous in it and his character reminded me quite a bit of Richard Dreyfus's character in CEofT3rdK.

Although some of the science can be questionable the emotionality of it overcame my objections.

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Bud Brewster
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PostPosted: Tue Jan 29, 2019 12:20 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

________________________________

The only part of this movie I wish had been done differently is the tragedy which occurred during the scene with the astronauts trying to reach the orbiting "resupply model".

I just didn't want it to happened, and I came up with a way the astronauts could have prevented it which I think would have worked. But of course, the event was meant to provide drama for the story, so the producers wanted it to happen.

But I was really hoping they would do the trick I thought of. It would have been cool. Oh well . . .

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Gord Green
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PostPosted: Tue Jan 29, 2019 2:37 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Bud, that scene really angered me.....at first. But, thinking about it later it really hit home and it made me respect this film even more.
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Pow
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PostPosted: Tue Jan 29, 2019 2:53 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I also enjoyed this movie in spite of the dislike that many critics had for it.

My question is in regards to the Martian Face's alarm system.

When the original group of astronauts attempt to communicate with it it goes into a defensive mode and kills most of them.

Couldn't such a sophisticated system simply deny entry & not attack & murder other life forms?
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Gord Green
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PostPosted: Tue Jan 29, 2019 3:50 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Excellent point POW.

Perhaps it was not supposed to be so deadly. Remember the scene in 2001:ASO when the monolith on the Moon first activates from the rays of the Sun? The high pitched squeal from the monolith's transmission appeared to affect the crew and Floyd adversely.

The DNA test inside the face seemed overly complicated. After all, anyone capable of spaceflight reaching Mars should have been adequately intelligent enough for contact. How many first landings will include Biologists and DNA experts?

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scotpens
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PostPosted: Tue Jan 29, 2019 8:21 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Gord Green wrote:
Remember the scene in 2001: ASO when the monolith on the Moon first activates from the rays of the Sun? The high pitched squeal from the monolith's transmission appeared to affect the crew and Floyd adversely.

Well, it may have made them temporarily deaf -- but it didn't kill them!
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Bogmeister
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PostPosted: Wed May 15, 2019 2:38 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

____________

One of two big budget films in year 2000 about a trip to Mars (the other one was Red Planet), this one was a little less edgy and contained a final act that attempted epic visuals & premises which fell short of expectations.

In the plot, taking place in year 2020, there was actually an earlier mission to Mars which encountered disaster; the lone survivor of that mission is played by Don Cheadle. So, most of the film is about the 2nd team of astronauts who head over to the red planet; that mission also experiences a major problem just before reaching orbit (just a lot of bad luck when it comes to the red planet), and then the team delves into the mysteries of the planet.

BoG's Score: 6 out of 10



BoG
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Eadie
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PostPosted: Sun Jun 07, 2020 3:12 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

How Disney’s Mission to Mars Went From Attraction to Brian De Palma Movie Back to Attraction

https://collider.com/mission-to-mars-disney-ride-movie-explained-brian-de-palma/

by Drew Taylor, June 7, 2020


45 years ago today Mission to Mars opened at the Magic Kingdom in Walt Disney World. The attraction, which simulated the experience of blasting guests to the red planet, would having an oddly lasting effect on the company, inspiring a poorly received film that in turn would serve as the basis an equally mediocre attraction. And on and on it goes, like the rotation of some huge planet. For some reason (and for many years), its gravitational pull was too great.

Tomorrowland was always the hardest land for Walt Disney to conceptualize. The future, after all, was a moving target, and giving the area the space age sleekness he was hoping for was expensive and cumbersome.

It was the last land to come together and was seemingly willed into existence thanks to Walt’s stubbornness and a loose confederacy of corporate sponsors that would pay for additional attractions.

One of those attractions, sponsored by TWA, was Rocket to the Moon. Adorned with an 80-foot tall rocket replica (taller than Cinderella Castle), the attraction’s facade was pure mod wonderment with swooping clean lines. This is what a space port, in the far-off year of 1986, would look like.

The attraction itself, which used projection and sound effects, approximated what a journey to the moon would feel like.

In 1967, new show buildings would be installed (complete with more immersive effects and a nifty, audio-animatronics-filled pre-show) and a new name would be given — Flight to the Moon (this time sponsored by McDonnell-Douglas Aircraft).

Sadly, the iconic rocket that used to welcome guests to the attraction was dismantled.

But by 1969, man had already visited the moon, and NASA would make regular trips over the next several years. It was no longer the stuff of fantasy.

Florida’s Magic Kingdom, set to be the opening salvo in the ambitious Walt Disney World project in Florida, was having a similarly hard time fleshing out its version of Tomorrowland. It would soon have a brilliant, eye-catching anchor attraction in the futuristic rollercoaster Space Mountain, but when the land first opened, it was also fighting the oil embargo which had pushed another of the projects down the line (if they were ever made at all).

The Magic Kingdom’s Tomorrowland opened as an odd mishmash of preexisting attractions and the same sort of lame, last-minute corporate sponsored cash grabs (in this case an attraction at the back of the land devoted to the history of air travel).

Flight to the Moon made the trip to Florida, but Disney knew it wouldn’t be able to sustain prolonged interest.

In June, 1975, Mission to Mars was first launched. It featured many of the same animatronics and even some of the same footage in the pre-show and ride fil. But new elements were made to the show itself, both in terms of effects (inflatable seats would be inflated or deflated, to simulate space travel) and story points (hello, hyperspace travel).

In 1975 Mission to Mars was installed in Disneyland too.

But by the early 1990s, it was starting to show its age. It lacked the visceral thrills and excitement that modern audiences demanded and much of the science and technology was outdated and creaky. It closed in 1992 in Disneyland and 1993 in Walt Disney World. The mission had come to an end.

Or had it?

Since the late 2000s, Disney had been noodling with the idea of turning some of its beloved theme park attractions into equally beloved big screen events.

The test pilot was Tower of Terror, a 1997 horror comedy starring Steve Guttenberg and Kirsten Dunst that aired on The Wonderful World of Disney and, more crucially, acted as an 89-minute commercial for The Twilight Zone: Tower of Terror, an innovative attraction that opened at what was then known as Disney — M-G-M Studios a few years earlier.

Part of the movie was actually filmed at the attraction in Florida.

At the time, M-G-M Studios took pride in the fact that it was a fully operational production studio, even though hardly anything was ever shot there. The movie was enough of a hit that several other projects inched through development. Among them were big screen adaptations of Pirates of the Caribbean and The Haunted Mansion, along with Dinosaur, an animated film that was using state-of-the-art technology and was being developed alongside an attraction set to open at Disney’s Animal Kingdom.

Ah, synergy.

But the film that would ultimately make it out of the gate first was Mission to Mars. Part of this had to do with an arms race Disney was having with Warner Bros, who was developing their own Mars-themed project called Red Planet.

A couple of years earlier Disney had found itself in a similar situation as its own Armageddon squared off against Paramount and DreamWorks’ Deep Impact.)

And part of it had to do with the fact that the studio really didn’t publicize that it was based on the theme park attraction, which at the time had been shuttered for the better part of a decade.

The movies-based-on-theme-park-attractions idea appealed to Disney chief Michael Eisner, but it still made him nervous. It was Eisner who made the last-minute decision to add the cumbersome subtitle to Pirates of the Caribbean in an effort to distance itself from the attraction. If Mission to Mars was a success, so be it. But the connections between the theme park attraction and the movie were not going to be explicitly drawn.

And, truth be told, the movie — directed by Brian De Palma from a screenplay officially credited to Jim and John Thomas and Graham Yost — doesn’t have a whole lot to do with the original attraction.

Sure, it’s about an expedition to Mar — but there aren’t any direct parallels to be drawn, save for that amazing long shot set to Van Halen’s “Dance the Night Away” that features a rotating circular centrifuge which explicitly recalls a similar image on one of the screens in the Mission to Mars pre-show. (It’s a deep cut, I know.)

Where there could have been references, there are emphatically not. You’d think that some of the characters could have had the last name “Morrow” or “Johnson,” references to the audio-animatronic figure that gave you the rundown in the ride’s pre-show. But, alas, there are none.

De Palma — whose experience on the film wasn’t particularly positive (“It was relentless,” he said in the De Palma documentary) — never mentioned the original attraction. It’s unclear if he even knew the film was an adaptation of a popular theme park attraction.

When Mission to Mars came out in the spring of 2000 (happy 20th!), it lost money, making $111 million internationally from a budget of over $100 million.

De Palma was so broken by the project that he left the United States. “The Hollywood system we work in does nothing but destroy you,” De Palma said in the documentary. “When I finished that movie, that’s when I got on a plane and went to Paris. Mission to Mars was the last movie I made in the United States.”

(Mission to Mars did get some strong notices from critics, particularly overseas. It was #4 on Cashiers du Cinema’s collective Top 10 that year, outranking The Virgin Suicides and In the Mood For Love.)

But box office be damned, Mission to Mars was going to live on!

EPCOT — Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow — had wanted a space pavilion since the early 1990s. It made sense. EPCOT (formerly EPCOT Center) was the science and discovery park. Space should have always been there. Initial plans called for a giant pavilion, wherein several attractions would be accessible. One would have simulated a spacewalk, with guests suspended from an overhead track, peering into the outside of a space station.

But budget cuts and the popularity of Horizons — a sort-of space-themed attraction about futuristic communities occupying the same land that the new pavilion would have been placed — meant the space pavilion was off the table.

But the idea was being revisited at the close of the decade. Horizons had lost its corporate sponsorship, and a large sinkhole had been detected underneath its massive show building! They could finally do the really-for-real space pavilion, and they had a cutting-edge idea to go along with it — a spinning centrifuge that would make you feel weightles!

They also had a flashy Disney movie they could piggyback on! Mission to Mars.

Disney enlisted Gary Sinise, one of the stars of Mission to Mars, to host the preshow for the new attraction, now called Mission: Space. Sinise essentially is playing the same character but his name is never spoken.

And the big, wheel-shaped room from the “Dance the Night Away” scene is actually a part of the attraction’s extended queue, along with several model spaceships from the film. Much of the visual effects work for the movie was provided by Dream Quest Images, Disney’s in-house visual effects company, that was shuttered following Mission to Mars’ release).

On a narrative level, this new attraction borrowed heavily from the Mission to Mars attraction, including the conceit that you are being trained to make the journey to outer space and the patina of pseudo-scientific education. But this time the emphasis was on thrills.

So Mission to Mars, a movie inspired by a Disney theme park attraction, inspired another Disney theme park attraction — moving in a circle, just like the astronauts in the movie. Who has the Van Halen?

Sadly, some of Mission to Mars has been scrubbed off of Mission: Space in recent years. In 2017 it went down for a refurbishment. The ride film was redone, with updated graphics by Industrial Light & Magic, and a new film was made for the cuddlier version of the attraction, this time a zoom above earth.

Also, Sinise was replaced. It’s the same script and the same awkward staging, but Gina Torres stepped in for Lt. Dan {referring to Forrest Gump (1994)}, welcoming guests aboard the attraction and explaining key safety information.

But it wasn’t totally gone — the oversized props and sets are still in the queue. And the memory of the ouroboros of Mission to Mars still looms large in our memory. It’s positively planetary.

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Bud Brewster
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PostPosted: Sun Jun 07, 2020 3:57 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

________________________________

A great article, Space Cadet Eadie! I enjoyed it. Cool

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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)


Last edited by Bud Brewster on Tue Jan 09, 2024 4:17 pm; edited 3 times in total
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Eadie
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PostPosted: Sun Jun 07, 2020 4:04 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Have I been DEMOTED? (My avatar picture says I'm a Galactic Ambassador.)
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Bud Brewster
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PostPosted: Sun Jun 07, 2020 4:38 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

________________________________

Opps, my apologies! It was just a familiar sci-fi phrase, not a reference to your actual All Sci-Fi rank.

I simply meant that you're the board's youngest fan of classic sci-fi. Trust me, we're all intensely envious of your youth, energy, and intelligence! Wink

Enjoy it while it lasts, Miss Eadie. We all did that, back in our younger days, . . . and it's now just a fond memory. Sad

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