Nav
Survive Mars
Mission to Mars
 
M2M
articles
images
 

Newsweek Article

A nice little article has appeared over at the NEWSWEEK web-site. 12/4/99


Space age: Why Tinseltown's got a case of Mars fever
By Andrew Murr and Jeff Giles
Newsweek, December 6, 1999


When the folks at the Mars Society asked James Cameron to speak at their annual convention this year, they probably expected him to be polite. Instead, the "Titanic" director stood before them and asked, "Why the hell do you wackos want to go to Mars?" He was just kidding: in truth, Cameron is as evangelical as anyone about Mars, and he figures politicians won't lead the call for funding. "We don't have the same conditions as when John Kennedy declared a race to the moon," he told NEWSWEEK. "Then we were racing the Soviet Union. Today, it's going to have to come from grass roots-from the public clamoring to get it done." Cameron has vowed to stir up "Mars fever."

It seems the wackos at the Mars Society have found some powerful allies: the wackos in Hollywood. So many projects are in the works that soon we'll all have either Mars fever or Mars flu. The studios are clearly responding to the public's fascination with 1997's Sojourner mission-and the success of movies like "Apollo 13" and "Armageddon." So Brian De Palma's "Mission to Mars," with Gary Sinise, will land in theaters in March, and another would-be blockbuster, "Red Planet," starring Val Kilmer, is set for summer 2000. As for Cameron, he'll produce two missions in 2001, one a TV miniseries, the other a short 3-D IMAX movie, which he'll direct. Most filmmakers insist their movies will be realistic. Cameron believes that extravaganzas like "Star Wars" and "Star Trek" have actually hurt NASA's real-life adventures. "Hollywood has done a disservice to the true adventure of space travel by making it look too easy," he says.

Both of Cameron's projects are set in 2016, and center on the first manned mission to Mars-and a subsequent rescue mission. NASA has helped the director draw up rigorously realistic vehicles. "What we want to show," says Cameron, "is something that is plausible and defendable."

De Palma's movie amps up the drama slightly. The year is 2020. A mysterious explosion kills three American astronauts living on the Red Planet, and NASA launches a rescue mission to pick up a batty survivor. The spacecraft and the spacesuits will look like pure NASA. And the scenery, shot in Vancouver, will look surprisingly Martian. Art director Ed Verreaux spent hours staring at the Sojourner pictures, and crews shot red concrete out of fire hoses, covering 2 million square feet.

Of all the Mars movies, "Red Planet" will likely be the most fanciful. Producer Mark Canton pitches it as " 'Into Thin Air' on Mars." It's 2050, or thereabouts, and greenhouse gases are choking Earth. But on the first manned mission to Mars the lander crash-lands on the planet. Soon, the astronauts are fighting each other-and killer space worms. "We are breaking some of the rules," Canton says of "Red Planet's" realism, "but it doesn't mean we are not going to get closer to the truth." Whatever it takes to capture the public imagination, and get astronauts-not just actors-closer to Mars.

 

 

 

 

Survive Mars.com is copyright © 1999, 2000 Bert Ehrmann
all other contents copyright © their respective owners

Dangerous Universe