Get your ass to Mars

MARS EXPRESS

2023 eux/2024 nous

Directed by Jérémie Périn

Written by Laurent Safarti and Jérémie Périn

Spoilers: moderate

In my more melancholic moments, I look back at the last hundred years—which is the century of motion pictures and of animation, as well as the century of science fiction's exponential expansion—and imagine that here in 2024, we're simply not going to get too many more ideas that are rock-your-socks-off new, so the best we can realistically hope for is old ideas pursued with real human passion and arranged into shapes pleasing to the mind, rather than just old IPs flogged again and again for the possibility that there might still be some coins left in them that haven't been bashed out yet.  That brings us to Mars Express, a film that you'd have to admit is doing not one single new thing, if you've been paying even marginal attention to sci-fi for the past thirty years, until, maybe, its last few minutes, which still won't feel revolutionary if you've been paying just modest attention.  (I'm just not sure I've seen the exact notion pursued in a movie before.)  And, you know, whatever: Mars Express is not out to reinvent the cyberbrain.  It's not even correcting for the questions that cyberpunk noir tropes always prompt, like "why did you build the sexbot able to punch through a steel door?"  But it's absolutely terrific anyway.

I cannot speak to the soul of Jérémie Périn, Mars Express's co-writer and director (or to that of co-writer Laurent Safarti), but it sure feels like he's put everything he's got into it, and to some extent or another, maybe that's literally true, since one of the most obvious purposes (and most obvious pleasures) of Mars Express is to offer itself as a handy compendium for every last cyberpunk idea its two writers ever thought was cool, so there's a kind of list-making passion that would be here even in the absence of any other drive.  But I do also mean that he's put the proper effort into really working it out.  It's one strikingly confident feature debut after a spotty career working on nothing you'll have ever heard of: his highest-profile project prior to this one was the French fantasy-action animated series Lastman a good eight years ago.  This was, presumably, where he picked up Safarti (who wrote most of the episodes), and afterwards they cocooned themselves in the French animation industry for almost a decade within the chrysalis of the dubiously-named production company, "Everybody On Deck," at last emerging late last year, with such a splendid imago of a movie that you might've thought that it would finally have put French animation, a quaint industry that sometimes provides filler Best Animated Feature nominees for the Oscars, back on the world map.  This didn't happen in a big way (but, after all, I watched it), and who knows?  Sometimes things take time.

The thing about Périn's confidence is that it's justified, which is a rare feat in a debut; and shockingly enough, he's rendered his list-making impulse a disciplined one, indistinguishable from an actual story being told.  It's possible that the very worst thing about his movie is just that it begins with two different "cold opens" before its opening credits happen, one after the other, so as-yet unconnected that they're on two separate planets, and without anything even marking that they are; even then, it's awkward, but I'm a little stymied trying to figure out how to restructure it to be less awkward.

So the first one takes us to a dorm room in a university in the dome city of Noctis, Mars; the year is 2200, according to a background detail that I think we can assume, in these circumstances, speaks authoritatively.  Here a young woman opens her door, expecting the police, only to be immediately and brutally assassinated; but if the other young woman hiding under a bubblebath is any indication, she wasn't the intended target.  Both women will matter to the plot, but only eventually.  The second open brings us to Earth.  This one matters right away, because it introduces us to our heroine, private detective Alina Ruby (Léa Drucker in the French audio track but after watching both, I strongly prefer the performances in the English dub, written by Jeffrey Paul Kearney and voice directed by voice acting legend and—huh—apparent Frenchman, Michael Sinterniklaas; hence we credit Morla Gorrodona, and the other English VAs going forward).  Alongside her dead, ex-human-uploaded-into-a-robot partner Carlos Rivera (Josh Keaton), Alina's on an assignment from tech overlord Royjacker (Kiff VandenHuevel) to nab a dirty pair of hackers, Roberta Williams (Sarah Hollis) and Roberta's was-always-a-robot robot, LEM (Billy Bob Thompson), for cyber-crimes against Royjacker's empire.  Mission accomplished, then it's back to the Red Planet on the—wait for it—Mars Express, and with that, a pretty sweet title drop via the logo on the side of all the rad spaceplanes' giant carrier vessel.

They arrive on Mars to discover their warrant's vanished into the digital ether—those hackers will be important later, too, but much later—and Alina and Carlos take on a new case, that of the vanished college girls.  And at this point it starts getting twisty and turny, with enough surprises (even if they're frequently the "expected" kind of surprises), so I'll only say they pursue the mystery of how the surviving college student, Jun Chow (Jenapher Cheng), somehow managed to jailbreak a robot through code alone (the number of times the script is obliged to say the term "jailbreak" may, therefore, rise to the level of "legitimate flaw").  But that's not even what she did, what she did was worse, and this leads Alina and Carlos towards a conspiracy that threatens to swallow Mars and more.  And so, all told, we've got a nice little sci-fi neo-noir.

The unignorable thing is that this is avowedly derivative: it's Ghost In the Shell, even more particularly a compressed season of Ghost In the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, removed in its setting in frankly minor ways that really only matter for a few plot points anyway (albeit important ones), and then refitted with new character classes.  Both of these things only tend to make it resemble Cowboy Bebop when it's not resembling Ghost In the Shell.  (So it also resembles Blade Runner, but now I'm just saying what you already know, and it doesn't have Blade Runner's depressive, apocalyptic tone.  The tone of Mars Express is more like GItS's wary futurism, capturing the sensation of a society moving quickly into post-human incomprehensibility but managing to muddle through anyway, which is probably a nicer place to have an adventure.)  If it's not Ghost In the Shell, though it usually is, then it's riffing on some other cyberpunk fiction.  But that's basically just genre, the same way its narrative spine being Chinatown is likewise just genre, noir shading into grandiose paranoid thriller, and while it's something I made peace with before I finished it the first time, one of the itchier aspects here is that its plot maybe grows too big, when a big part of the enjoyment is just exploring this take on its genre niche through the small fries who inhabit it.  (It's at least tightly-constructed, with only a couple of logistical snags, and the most egregious one—why'd Jun go back to her dorm, or even have the opportunity to?—is obscured by disaggregation.)  And even its finale exemplifies how Périn and Safarti, in full awareness they might never get to make another movie, must've thrown everything at the wall with this one—it's inconceivable that Mars Express could ever have a sequel.

Thus this labor of love, remixed enough to be its own thing, willing to exploit the fact that cyberpunk is old and venerable by now, and assume that this couldn't be your first exposure, either; what that means is an inordinately efficient movie, just blazing through its scenes, with its manifold future ideas expressed either as a matter of exposition-light plot importance, or simply thrown in as texture, albeit probably more of the former than is evident at first blush, with a fair amount of that texture circling back a good hour later to inform plot without it even necessarily even being stressed.  Having seen it twice, it's remarkable how much of the screenplay didn't register as exposition, even when it is, at bottom, exposition; it just doesn't come off that way, cannily written with hardly any "as every single person in our society knows," and with the available bandwidth devoted instead to the story rather than explaining how this presently-relevant technology works, along with some astoundingly precise and clear storytelling.  A fine example is the... safety goo, I guess (it never gets a name) that instantly fills up a (self-driving) car in the event of a crash to protect its occupants.  That's self-explanatory enough to not need dedicated "set-up," but its precise qualities become highly germane during the film's single best action sequence, where it both protects and immobilizes our heroes in a situation where they really need to be free to move.  And so when the dumb, non-sapient highway rescue robots arrive to assist, what they're actually doing is removing the last layer of defense between them and their attackers, so there's going to be the narrowest window of time to act, and when one of them does, that depends on us having fully internalized this universe's rules to understand what the hell has just happened, and why the attackers behaved the way they did.  It's a movie that demands your close attention, but also continually rewards it.  (And now that they have set up this technology, they can use it later in a very amusing gag straight out of Futurama; so when it's not GItS, a lot of times it's an unusually sober episode of Futurama, which is kind of awesome.)

Périn is packaging it with a cleanliness that befits my idea of European illustration, even if his heart pretty clearly belongs to Japanese animation; I had, for whatever reason, expected this to be more "French," and particularly to hearken more towards pulpy 70s sci-fi, Valérian et Laureline-style, but that's still a noticeable part of its makeup that helps give it its own identity.  (Its second open could be consciously Fifth Element-y.)  That's predominantly a matter of character design, which isn't very "anime," inasmuch as it's a distinct stylization that trends a little more "realistic" (for one thing, ethnicities are determinable).  As far as sequences go, the most salient "this is doing specifically European graphic art" is probably when they visit a robot brothel (technically, a brothel staffed by "back-ups," former humans whose original bodies have died and been uploaded into android frames, like Carlos, which maybe tells us where such intermediate beings fit on the social ladder), which is introduced with a certain abstraction and prefaced with a healthy dose of "ew" perversity; I'm also fond of the way the golden unicorn sexbot (in a completely different strand of the plot) shades into 70s "space babes in loincloths" visual art.  I would not describe it as a prurient movie despite how I'm now making it sound; anyway, what actually happens to the robot prostitute at the robot brothel could not be more "I have possibly watched too many iterations of Ghost In the Shell."  In a good way.*

As for the cleanliness, some of that is a result of straining, productively, right at the limits of what I expect the film's budget of 9 million euros can buy you in terms of animation.  I've come to kind of actively admire how carefully that budget gets used, especially in how palpably reluctant Mars Express is to actually animate anything that doesn't strictly need to be—the number of "extras" who literally don't move is bold for a theatrically-released feature, but Périn at least has the sense to use it to direct your attention to what he wants you to look at.  The flipside of this is that what does need to be animated is usually pretty great on the terms of the restrained aesthetic that the film's going for throughout, with an enormous amount of believable weight to the character animation (which, for the robots, sometimes comes in painted 3-D), and action that even benefits from being pared down to its essentials, "inexpensive" in the denotative sense, but feeling molded exactly the way their maker wanted them to be, coming with the hard-edged personality offered by fast staccato rhythms and instant consequences for violence delivered with minimal inbetweening.  (There are, I believe, four significant action scenes, and the least good is the one at the end that had the most money thrown at it, with the unnerving "organic" version of a GItS Tachikoma.**)  Backgrounds can suffer from the combination of budget and ambition: whenever Mars Express untethers its "camera" and takes recourse to CG environments, it's a toss-up whether it'll look good or cheap (fortunately, the major Mars mountain highway action sequence has finesse, but there's another shot of the same car in this movie that looks like Périn's goal was a CGI version of the classic arcade game, Pole Position).  What doesn't suffer is the art direction as such, which is thoughtful and idea-packed throughout even if it needs to be spare, and beyond any 2-D/3-D shenaniganry, Périn and his story artists are being playful with layouts in ways that I don't think I could compare to anything offhand: there's numerous examples, but the one that sticks in my mind is that this cartoon uses a "split-diopter shot"—of the kind I'm constantly saying more live-action filmmakers should remember exist!—and apparently solely for this movie to be the one cartoon in history to have a split-diopter shot.  I love it.

But I love, even more, the character animation, and if I haven't really spoken of a human element to Mars Express, it's because that character animation is where the majority of it lies.  That's not to say all of it: Carlos winds up with more heft than anybody with his ongoing unlife and attachment to Alina (it is quite possible she technically "owns" him), as well as his complete disattachment from his estranged family.  Unexpectedly but naturally enough, it's Carlos who gets (by a really substantial margin) the most emotion out of this story's denouement.  There's also an effort to establish some kind of significance to the relationship between our detectives and Royjacker, evidently a comrade during their military days.  This is the one obvious whiff of Périn and Safarti's light-touch exposition—that is, you "get" the backstory, but the backstory doesn't and can't mean anything to you when the film itself can't figure out a way to provide any interaction between the three that actually activates that backstory, so it seems pointless, the only thing about Royjacker even pushing against complete stereotype is that he's kindly toward his "retired" sapient digital assistant, Beryl (Fiona Jones), rather than summarily deleting her.  (Motivationally, he's as clear as mud as regards his and Beryl's Reverse Butlerian Jihad.)  It's a pity because Périn is going as hard for this relationship as anything else in his movie, tossing out an entirely unique editing scheme not echoed in any other sequence here for Alina and Royjacker's cleavage point, with quick-dissolves replacing cuts, and concluding with an expressionistic removal of background elements.  It at least manages to tell us that Périn wants this to matter.  (And I'll mention that it's a tightly, consciously "edited" movie, this cartoon, usually to its great benefit; the exception is the very odd penchant for hard cuts to eight-to-ten frames of black at the end of some scenes that are as mysterious to me as I expect they are to their director.)

So it comes down to character animation, particularly Alina's character animation, in biggest part how it deviates from the assumption that "good" means "fluid" and "a lot of frames."  What's true of everybody is that there's a superb graphic simplicity here, and, despite some loving and dynamic lighting effects, a resolute commitment to flatness.  But Alina is our primary portal into this world, and she's really well-built for that purpose (plus she's the character with the most screentime so it's wise and correct she's also the best-animated), already interesting on the basis of a sleek design that makes her one of the more extraordinarily angular figures you're likely to see anywhere in animation today, along with convolution to her face during certain expressions that suggests that she's hitting middle age, but nothing that, through design alone, is going to lift her completely out of pure "detective, drunk, female" character sketching.  (Though Carlos's "floating head" design is also neat.)  What does, however (beyond Gorrodona's solid vocal work) is how this design gets animated, just front-to-back weird expressions, which can get frozen, completely unmoving, for a startlingly long time, or with very minimalistic movement, and in these held frames and subtle gradations of sarcastic smirks and fart-smelling frowns a real character does emerge, the film's primary vector for a beautifully dry sense of humor that's far more pronounced, with Alina and otherwise, than you'd guess if I told you the named character body count.  (LEM is also one reliable self-superior funny robot.)  I guess if you're throwing back to the turn of the century, you might as well replicate the animation styles of your influences too—TV anime with strategically-limited animation—but it was pretty damned rare to see it done this intelligently and deliberately.  It's far more than enough for an enjoyable anchor (and kind of sublime that it comes out of effectively nothing on the screenplay page), and an anchor was all Mars Express ever really required, in the best tradition of sci-fi that fundamentally just wants you to come live in its vision of its world for a while.

Score: 9/10

*Though this film about artificial consciousness somehow avoids GItS-style philosophical bloviation.

**I have a few literalist dweeb nitpicks, but this action scene features firing bullets into the air so they come down in an arc with brain-splattering force.  In Martian gravity?