This film is the beginning of me realising that John Carpenter can make mistakes and is starting to go off the boil. I went to a premier screening of this movie in the centre of London and I really wanted to enjoy this movie and on the whole, I think it was alright. But when I hold someone in such high regard and believe they can do no wrong when they do it is just so hard to contemplate it. This film saw the end of his directing career as he did not direct again for another 9 years. It was panned by the critics and more concerning for him and the producers it failed to make 50% of its original budget at the box office. Released in 2001 it was three years after he directed Vampires and it left a big deficit that John struggled to distance himself from and had to turn his hand to other work.
The story revolved around Mars about 200 years into the future where humans have managed to terraform the majority of it. This means that humans can now walk around on the red dust ball of a planet and not explode or struggle for too long without breathing apparatus. Women have taken the majority of the leadership roles and a group of police officers are brought to a desolate mining town to collect a rough fugitive played by Ice T by the name of Desolation Williams. Well the mining team had managed to dig through a seal that contained the original indigenous species’ spirits are realised and they take possession of the mining folk. The people form a gang and turn into a psychopathic band of crazed killers that enjoy inflicting gross acts of violence on anyone not possessed or on themselves. Piercing are the new thing but these are with needles, nails and anything else they have to hand. Well copying a story straight from his own movie Precinct 13 the bad guys have to team up with the police in an attempt to stay alive and catch the train out of this crazy town.
The plot was taken straight from a Western with guns firing and fights throughout but the story is not strong enough to warrant moving an Assault On Precinct 13 on a completely foreign planet. Rather than making the movie desolate and remote you don’t feel that the cops are as stuck and desperate as you would think they would be in this situation. The interactions between the expensively gathered cast including Natasha Henstridge, Ice Cube, Jason Statham, Pam Grier, Clea DuVall, and Joanna Cassidy just doesn’t seem to work. The story is a basic one set in a strange arena and that twist is not enough to make this a success. Its not a bad film, it honestly isn’t but is that enough to make it a successful, great classic movie, well no, for me sadly not.
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