Director: John Carpenter
Cast: Ice Cube, Natasha Henstridge, Jason Statham, Pam Grier, Clea DuVall, Joanna Cassidy
Screenplay: John Carpenter, Larry Sulkis
98 mins. Rated R for strong violence/gore, language and some drug content.

Many frequent readers will note the love I carry for John Carpenter (Halloween) and his impressive film career. Being one of my favorite directors, there are very few Carpenter films that don’t end up in heavy rotation at my home. It’s crazy to think that a director of his caliber has struggled so much within the studio system, swearing it off several times in the decades of classic creations, finally leaving the studio system as a director forever in 2001 following the release of Ghosts of Mars. Studio interference is frequently an issue today with big-budget blockbuster spectacles, but make no mistake that meddling has been going on for decades longer, and the studio footprint is clear on this one.

In the far-flung future of 2176, a Mars-based police unit has been dispatched to the outpost city of Chryse to assist in the transfer of notorious criminal Desolation Williams (Ice Cube, 21 Jump Street). When they arrive, the outpost is uninhabited save for a few locked up in the prison cells. As they move forward with their mission, it becomes clear that there is danger threat at the edge of the outpost, the original inhabitants of the planet, on their way to reclaim their world.

Carpenter, for much of his career, has played in the realm of horror, but he’s always had a toe dipped into the Western genre, and Ghosts of Mars plays with the classic ideal of a ghost town, with the cavalry arriving too late to save some but hopefully with enough time to save themselves, and while it plays with heavy and disturbing ideas, Carpenter is never too far away from embracing the camp of the premise. Most of the time, Ghosts of Mars is fully enveloped in a thick layer of cheese (something the younger me would not have noticed back when it originally released). It’s just that his vision is constantly at battle with other elements. The studio clearly wanted a more visceral film, one that plays seriously, more akin to the heavy and unflinching Assault of Precinct 13, which shares some DNA with this film.

It’s clear to see that the studio was pushing pretty heavily away from Carpenter’s vision here, and looking at the studio’s other films from this era, they wanted something simple and digestible and easy. They pushed back against casting Jason Statham (Snatch) in the lead role of Desolation Williams in favor of a more bankable star in Ice Cube. From my viewpoint, Statham would’ve had much more fun in the lead than as the thankless character he plays in the finished product, a horned up asshole that doesn’t gel with Carpenter’s depiction of a matriarchal society. His other lead in Natasha Henstridge (Species) was added to the cast last minute after original star Courtney Love had to depart. Henstridge is so wooden in the film, completely miscast, and Love would have at least made the role their own and given some energy to the Lieutenant.

Now, it’s been frequently theorized that the film was originally a sequel to Escape from New York with Snake Plissken in place of Desolation Williams, and while I’d love to see that movie one day, pretty much everyone involved in the production has disputed that when asked, and it’s unfortunate that Carpenter didn’t go there, as placing Plissken in a team that has to trust him to survive would make for an exhilarating trilogy capper. The mere idea of Kurt Russell alongside Pam Grier (Jackie Brown) sounds like an instant upgrade, and it would have fit with the tone that Carpenter was going for.

Ghosts of Mars has an entertaining opening and a thrilling finale, and it’s clear from these portions of the film what the intended style and tone were meant to be, but it struggles in that middle portion from way too many sequences of characters standing in undefined rooms and corridors and discussing options, and there are some really dumb characters when you view them through the lens of being the most skilled of police forces and some cunning criminals, with the latter being the most egregious of examples. There’s a scene where the power is all held by the criminals, who then proceed to enter a prison cell, all together, and then get locked in easily by one of the police force. When the movie is focused directly on the mystery and the threat outside, it works, and the explanation for the enemies are disturbing and pretty damn rock ‘n’ roll, but a lot of the middle is frustratingly static.

I can appreciate what Carpenter is going for here, and there’s a good movie inside of this thing, but it’s uneven nature, and some obvious studio interference, make for merely an okay experience, one not worthy of this legend of horror. With Statham (or hell, Kurt Russell) and Grier in the leads instead of Ice Cube and Henstridge, and with a better viewpoint of Carpenter’s intended Martian Western, Ghosts of Mars would be on another level. It’s just too bad that John Carpenter’s always been ahead of the curve and misunderstood by the very studios who hired him.

2½/5
-Kyle A. Goethe

• For more John Carpenter: Halloween, The Fog, The Thing, Christine, Body Bags, Village of the Damned, In the Mouth of Madness