Well it looks like Father Geek made the right decision last night. I had a FREE pass to a local preview screening of M2M for yesterday evening. I chose to help sister_satan666@yahoo.com (Harry's sibling) move her impressive near complete ET collection and her fine animation cel collection out of Geek Headquarters instead. Now that was entertainment of a far superior level, outstanding images and intense drama. (will she leave anything, perhaps the TinkerBell cel, or KOKO the Clown) Buuuuut Noooooo, the sharp little femme fatale took it all, as her kind always do. Rats!!! She remembered Spielburg's "Nocturnal Fear" ET2 scriptment. Wait a minute what's that you're hauling out the door, not the oil of the Fairy Princess. That's mine! Falk the watercolorist gave that to me before your Mom and I got married in 1970. So what if it did hang in your bedroom at the ranch all those years, she stole it from me during the divorce. Not tears, no, anything but that. OK take it, we need the room anyhow. The Horror... The Horror! Yes my evening turned out far more exciting for staying home, just read on geeks, if you dare, read on...

Hey Father Geek, I caught a screening with some friends last night. Beforehand, we actually discussed how we were sorta bummed because, while the trailer was pretty damn cool, that item on your site about the NYU screening definitely gave us pause.

I'm no fan of pretentious, rarified cinema. Hell, I still think Lost in Space is an enjoyable mess of a film. Mission to Mars, on the other hand ... well, pejoratives very nearly fail me. I won't even attempt coherence. This is just a litany of the film's awfulness.

During the screening, my friends and I just kept staring at each other incredulously. I mean, let's begin with the acting. Porno-film bad. MTV-Music-Awards-parody bad. Characters speaking to each other with an utter lack of conviction, sincerity, or even, HELL, eye contact or connection. That terrible opening sequence at the barbecue with its three disjointed, meaningless "single" takes, that weird spiel in the driveway where Don Cheadle just runs on for about five minutes of dry expository dialogue ("First your wife died ... man oh man ... then you lost the Mars mission ... man oh man ... then blah blah blah) looking almost DIRECTLY INTO THE CAMERA! And Gary Sinise? What a stench! All he did was crack a crooked smile every now and then. That was his character trait! And let's consider Kim Delaney's bizarre, thankless, hammy participation as his deceased wife ... I have to assume most of her scenes were edited out, because her billing was awfully high for someone who only appeared in a cheesy video flashback for about three minutes.

The shameless lack of authenticity: Apparently, thirty years from now, NASA will be manned solely by an old man with a pot belly and a bunch of college interns. Where was Mission Control?! The media?! Earth?! There were hardly any people in this movie! Also, Jerry O'Connell is supposed to be an astronaut? Wasn't his character trait, like, being afraid of the dark or something? Or Tim Robbins and his wife, and those bizarrely unprofessional "We'd rather fuck than respond to a red alert" or "Mars is nigh, shall we waltz?" scenes? Also, is it just me, or did that little "meteor" that got lodged in the ship's view screen look an awful lot like something that came out of a colonial musket? Jeez.

The music! Groan. Lifted from sitcoms (think Comet-the-dog mischief on The Brady Bunch) and The Parent Trap, perhaps? Strange, pervasive, intrusive, and wildly inappropriate! Those little patriotic riffs during the "communion" with the alien? Grimace.

The Alien: Made out of computer-generated chintz, I guess? And if you were an alien race trying to be helpful, would you leave an obscure puzzle without any instructions? I'd think at least some sort of interplanetary flight safety manual-type mural would be helpful. Also, I guess the planetarium was holographic, but the alien entity was ... some sort of ... magic? Because the ass-tronauts held hands with it and stuff, and then there was that lovely aforementioned little patriotic riff over the soundtrack (intrepid!).

When Gary Sinise decides to forsake humanity, all Don Cheadle can manage is a HAND SHAKE?! Dude, he saved your life, and you've been alone for eight months and you're never gonna see him again. Methinks this calls for an open-mouth kiss, at least. It definitely would have been in keeping with the film's already bizarre anything-goes tone.

And yeah, when my friends and I saw the "point of no return" warning on the girl-astronaut's suit-screen during the space-walk, we were like, Who manufactured the suit? ACME by way of Warner Bros.? It was a Wile E. Coyote moment, to be sure. I could have done without that gross and exploitative Tim Robbins flash-freeze, however. Yuck. Although we were sorta expecting something to shatter his head, and were disappointed when that didn't happen. It was that kind of movie, after all.

Incidentally, my favorite scene was when the alien shed a tear, because by then the film had already become one of the ten worst films I've ever seen, so I was really beginning to enjoy the profound excess of dime-store sentiment. And that flashback montage as Gary blasts off? Straight outta Baby Geniuses.

No need to conceal my name. I don't really wanna work for Disney anyway.

R.

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Raza Syed