It's the same old space story

Although Mission to Mars is set in 2020, the vision of scriptwriting brothers Jim and John Thomas and Graham Yost is strictly mid-20th century or earlier. <br><br>No 1950s outer-space movie cliche is left

Friday, March 10th 2000, 12:00 am

By: News On 6

Although Mission to Mars is set in 2020, the vision of scriptwriting brothers Jim and John Thomas and Graham Yost is strictly mid-20th century or earlier.

No 1950s outer-space movie cliche is left unexplored, and there are plenty of references to 1968's 2001: A Space Odyssey as well, from the astronauts getting their exercise along the inside wheel of a space station to a talking computer. By the time a futuristic flying saucer takes off for deep space trailing a wispy plume of smoke, you think Buck Rogers can't be far behind. So much for Martian technology.

It was barely the middle of the movie when laughter erupted at a recent screening. An astronaut, dangling in deep space outside a bound-for-Mars rocket ship, deadpanned ``You'd better get some oxygen, Jim,'' to a comrade inside who had been holding his breath while the air system was briefly switched off.

Unfortunately, the laughter continued and only grew louder as the clunky aspects of Mission to Mars blossomed. As an astronaut attempts a particularly dangerous outer-space rescue on her partner, who is floating down toward the Martian atmosphere, her wrist calibrator flashes: ``POINT OF NO RETURN.'' When her partner realizes he cannot be saved, he removes his helmet and is immediately freeze-dried, leaving him looking very much like Disney head Michael Eisner, who bankrolled this clunker.

Mission to Mars is full of noble characters, final-second rescues and pregnant pauses to herald melodramatic turns of events.

That's too bad because the film starts off with some depth -- Tim Robbins and Connie Nielsen play married astronauts who seem very much in love; Gary Sinise is a depressed astronaut who's still trying to cope with the untimely death of his young wife.

Mission to Mars also has a provocative, although well-worn, science-fiction view of the origin of life on Earth (with the entire evolutionary scale covered in one minute of computerized animation) and some nifty special effects. The best is a giant tornadic funnel of red Martian dust that sucks people up like a vacuum-cleaner hose and rips them apart.

It's that dusty tornado that wrecks the first Mars mission and necessitates a rescue team. They go to Mars to explore a sudden and unexplained energy pulse that has all but wiped out communication with the Mars base camp. They hope to save the one astronaut who may still be alive on the red planet.

What they find is some bad acting by the usually good Don Cheadle and an alien creature right out of Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Director Brian De Palma (Carrie, Scarface, The Untouchables, Mission: Impossible) has had a career filled with ups and downs. In Mission to Mars he really does have a mission impossible: trying to rescue the script from its banalities and cross-references to earlier outer space movies. Rather than a brave new 21st-century world, Mission to Mars is on full throttle heading for the 1950s.

**

Mission to Mars

Starring : Gary Sinise, Tim Robbins, Don Cheadle, Connie Nielsen, Jerry O'Connell, Peter Outerbridge.

Producers: A Touchstone picture written by Jim Thomas, John Thomas and Graham Yost, directed by Brian De Palma.

Playing : Apple Valley, Harbour Mall, Holiday, Narragansett, North Dartmouth Mall, Showcase North Attleboro, Showcase Seekonk 1-10, Showcase Warwick, Stonington, Tri-Boro and Woonsocket cinemas.

Rated : PG, contains violence.

Running time: 1 hour, 50 minutes.