“Mars Express”

I finished this movie and had to just… go for a walk. Same vibe as “sitting with it,” but it left me wanting to get some air and see some trees.

Firstly, the movie is gorgeous. I don’t know enough about animation styles to say anything in detail, I’d kinda just say “anime, but the realistic style?” and call it good. But the setting, all the backdrops, the stylings of the technology, it’s all absolutely beautiful. For that alone, I’d say it’s worth watching.

I will mention, though, that it’s a fairly violent film. The opening scene is the shockingly brutal murder of a college student, and the pace of death stays pretty high. (And, from here, the pace of spoilers will also increase; you’ve been warned.)

The thing that struck me, for the majority of the film, was how many of the story beats felt the same as I, Robot—the film adaptation, that is. Rule 1 of robots: you can’t harm humans. There’s one megacorporation that makes all the robots. Protagonist doesn’t like robots because of a traumatic incident in their past where the robots Did A Bad. Hell, there’s even a “self-driving car on the highway turns into a big fight” scene!1 And, for all those similarities, I absolutely didn’t mind; I was quite happy, going into the final act of the movie, to call it “I, Robot, but done better and prettier,” and was waiting for the big reveal that the Bad Guy was just a pawn of the ominous giant meat-computer-thing in his office.

I am, in fact, delighted to say that I fell for the red herring. The meat computer was just a meat computer! The villain was capitalism all along! France, this movie is a work of art, and I thank you for it.

But what really had me needing a walk to contemplate was the ending. It wasn’t a happy ending. It was the quick death of the protagonist, and the long denouement of the guy who’d been set up as The Supporting Character all along getting some form of closure. I fell for the red herring again! I wasn’t even right about who the main character was!

An absolute delight of a film. I loved it, I’m likely to watch it again. It still does feel like “I, Robot done right,” but even more so. It isn’t the same plot rehashed, it’s the same vibe from the book, restated with how we feel about technology now. Go watch it.

Which is, by the by, one of the visually striking parts that’s still lodged in my mind. A highway through the middle of a cliffside, already a powerful aesthetic decision; the high speed chase with a missile, absolutely excellent; the replacement of airbags with quick-setting foam, and the way the road lit up to indicate a lane closure, just a cool concept. Using the immobilizing-but-bulletproof foam to turn a gunfight into a tense, suspenseful wait while yet another robot arrives to spray it away? Absolutely delightful. ↩