Written by Evan Purcell, April 12, 2016, at 7:00 p.m.
Every Tuesday, we’ll take a look at another mockbuster from the company that brought you Snakes on a Train, Transmorphers, and Alien vs. Hunter. This week, we’re blasting off to the Southern Californian desert – I mean Mars – for Martian Land.
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By the time The Martian was nominated for Best Picture, everyone knew why the story was so special. Unlike so many genre movies of the past few years, it was optimistic. It was bright. People can accomplish amazing things if they use their brains and work together. It was the kind of movie we needed to see. In response, The Asylum released Martian Land, which is the polar opposite: It’s pessimistic. It’s dark. It’s pretty dumb.
In the future, humans have destroyed the world and started new colonies on Mars. Because of our own scientific tampering, there’s a giant volcanic sandstorm that’s going to wipe out all the colonies unless a handful of scientists can zap it with EMF emitters. For an hour and half, we’re treated to faulty logic, off-brand Russian accents, family squabbling, and dust. Lots of lost of dust.
I know this sounds like goofy fun (and it is), but everything about this movie is thematically wrong. What made The Martian such an amazing piece of entertainment was its pro-science message. It was about the value of ingenuity, of figuring things out rationally and logically. There weren’t any villains in the movie, just smart professionals doing everything they could to rescue an astronaut. It was riveting and fascinating, but it had a very powerful, positive message about what humans can accomplish.
Martian Land takes a big, ol’ shit on that. For one thing, the science is gibberish. (Their plan to stop a volcanic superstorm: “I’ll send out a wave of charged particles.”) It doesn’t even try to make sense. But that’s not important. The science could’ve been as fake as possible, as long as the movie treats it with respect. It doesn’t.
In a direct reference to the Matt Damon movie, one character says, “I don’t think we’re gonna be able to science our way out of this one.” Rather than have characters work through problems rationally, things simply fix themselves. The daughter’s communicator starts working out of nowhere, for example. A spacesuit is broken, but characters still use it when the plot needs it.
Also, The Martian is all about the lengths people go to rescue one guy. In this movie, people get left behind all the time. A side character has a broken ankle, and the others leave her to get swallowed up by a dust storm. Even worse, characters give up constantly. The main character gives up at the end. His partner sacrifices himself without considering other options. It stands against everything that The Martian was trying to say.
And as for teamwork… No one works together. Half of the movie is spent with characters arguing with each other. No wonder Earth has been destroyed. Humans lost the ability to get along. The worst example is the space captain, the voice of authority who constantly tries to stop every possible rescue effort. She’s a horrible person, the embodiment of why this movie has such a negative outlook.
Like Matt Damon in the movie on which this is based (more or less), our main character is one of the brightest scientific minds in the world. Unlike Matt Damon, this guy is basically the only human who believes that he can use his ideas to fix Earth. Everyone else has abandoned Earth for the (even more inhospitable) Mars. Even though he’s surrounded by other scientists and experts, everyone seems to treat him with contempt because he hasn’t given up on his home planet like the rest of them. In fact, the big conflict between him and his estranged daughter is that he “chose” Earth over his child. That’s about as anti-science as it gets.
The basics of the plot are structured a lot like those of The Martian. In short, our main characters have a big problem to deal with. In order to do that, though, they have to achieve a series of smaller goals by using scientific know-how. The big difference between these movies, though, is that The Martian uses actual science (or at least what looks like actual science), whereas this film cops out at every turn.
For example, a hatch is open and raging wind from a dust storm is entering their dome. What a predicament! What could they possibly do? How about run to the wall and press a button. Bam. Problem solved. Then, the very next scene, the daughter and her girlfriend have a similar problem in their underground base. The daughter shouts out, “I have a plan!” So what’s her plan? Run to the wall and push another button. I mean, seriously. How is that a plan?
The entire movie follows that logic, which makes the viewing experience increasingly frustrating. Sure, some of the goals are interesting—using a makeshift lightning rod to power a rover, for example—but there aren’t any stakes in a movie with so many easy ways out.
Even the big obstacle—stopping the super-storm—is hard to follow. I couldn’t figure out where the storm was in relation to Mars New York and Mars Los Angeles. It felt as if the storm was circling Mars LA like a shark, which probably wasn’t the intention.
The filmmakers make plenty of other weird choices for the characters and the plot. For one thing, there’s the requisite lesbian subplot (a typical feature in these movies), but it goes absolutely nowhere. The girlfriends are together in every scene, but there’s no chemistry at all, except for one scene where they’re buckling each other’s safety vests. (That tells you everything you need to know about how sexless this film is.)
The main character’s backstory is a tad confusing. Because of his inventions, people are able to terraform Mars, making the planet at least partly able to sustain life. But when he arrives on Mars, he’s somehow surprised that they’re using his technology. He’s also surprised that they named a major land formation after him. You think he’d at least get an email.
Not surprisingly, we get a (spoiler alert) happy ending. The lesbian couple survives, the annoying captain is trapped behind a wall, and everyone is in the right place to zap the storm into nothing. Our only major casualty (aside from most of the population of Mars New York, I think) is the adopted dad who sacrifices himself for hard-to-follow reasons. This movie’s climax isn’t as crazy as other Asylum films (Remember when Thor punched lava into the shape of a magic hammer?) but it was effective. There’s some emotional charge in watching one man in a space suit stretched out in the middle of nothing as he records his own eulogy. (His final deathbed message: Don’t give up, because Mars will keep trying to kill you.) Of course, he gets rescued at the last minute, and all is right with the world. In the end, our scientist decides to abandon Earth and stay with his family on Mars, one final middle finger to any viewers who still held out hope that this movie wasn’t completely anti-science. The end.
All this adds up to a movie that is fun, dumb, and reasonably well made. If you divorce it from The Martian, then Martian Land is just your regular sci-fi disaster movie with technobabble, CGI dust storms, and lots of panels of blinking lights. In that regard, it’s a success.
Unfortunately, as a mockbuster, Martian Land is an epic failure. Mockbusters are supposed to be harmless cash-ins of better movies. If The Martian is an Oreo cookie, Martian Land is supposed to be the Wal-mart brand generic equivalent. Sugar gets replaced by aspartame, and there’s something not quite right about the taste, but it goes down easy. That’s the appeal of the mockbuster. This movie is no generic equivalent. It negates everything that The Martian stood for. It doesn’t celebrate science, or teamwork, or the can-do attitude of a bunch of well-trained professionals. If you liked The Martian, you will not like this, and that is the very definition of a failed mockbuster.
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Evan Purcell is the headmaster of a tiny private school in Zanzibar. In addition to writing mildly condescending reviews of bad films, he also writes everything from romance novels to horror stories. Check out his blog and Amazon author page. And in the meantime, get your ass to Mars!