John Carpenter's Ghosts of Mars (2001, duh) (Patreon)

42/100

With just hours to go before the A.V. Club's "best of 2001" poll deadline, I decided to make sure that my peers hadn't misjudged this film as badly as they'd misjudged Vampires (which I finally saw and thoroughly enjoyed a decade or so after its release). They had not. Henstridge makes a surprisingly convincing badass (opposite a suitably sullen Ice Cube), and Carpenter has some fun with his matriarchal future; I laughed out loud when Desolation's crew forces their way into his holding cell and then get so distracted with male bonding that Ballard is able to just casually walk out and lock them all in. But while the Precinct 13 on Mars concept has potential (however diminished by familiarity), Carpenter's unimpressive ghost-cam effects, cheesy heavy-metal score and clumsy reliance on nested flashbacks constantly get in the way of its fulfillment. (He's also strangely enamored of quick dissolves here.) What's more, the nature of the threat—ancient Martian spirits taking possession of humans—results in problems both logistical and thematic. Logistical: These ghosts are so numerous and so "contagious" (for lack of a better word), zipping into a new host the instant their current one is killed, that there's really no explanation for why our heroes don't all wind up as self-mutilating goth zombies by the end of that first pitched battle (outside, where they can't firmly shut the door on a pursuing red mist that looks like the work of Industrial Murk & Torpor). Thematic: Unless I've somehow missed a Starship Troopers level of po-faced satire, this film eventually reveals itself as staunchly pro-colonization, with Ballard at one point saying "This is about one thing. Dominion. It's not their planet anymore." Yeesh in my opinion—especially considering some of the makeup choices—and it was sobering, given the way this element leapt out at me, to look back at contemporaneous discussions on the movie-nerd chat group I then frequented and discover that it was literally never mentioned. To be fair, the Native Martians are technically deceased and all. But that didn't stop the Maitlands from hiring Beetlejuice to get the Deetzes out of their house.

ANAL-RETENTIVE TITLE CORNER: Longtime readers may wonder how I decide whether or not a possessive like John Carpenter's counts as part of the title. Simple answer: It doesn't unless I can find direct evidence that it's intended to. Usually that entails checking the poster's credit box to see whether it reads John Carpenter's "Ghosts of Mars" or "John Carpenter's Ghosts of Mars." If it's the latter—as is the case for this film and various other late Carpenters—I file it under J. (The possessive must also actually appear onscreen, of course.)