Movie Review: Mars Express

Mars Express

A pair of private investigators travel between Earth and Mars to probe into the disappearance of a college student and her roommate, who have been jailbreaking androids from their constraining moral programming.

This was a French film, which I suppose means something. I was ready to dislike this because a movie about advanced robotics in the future is always going to go a certain way. Will it be discount Ghost in the Shell, discount Blade Runner, discount Asimov/I, Robot, or discount Altered Carbon (which was half off to begin with)? Fortunately, Mars Express didn’t rehash them but neither did it build upon them.

It’s a police procedural, and even though Aline and Carlos aren’t cops they have a mostly good relationship with law enforcement and act as subcontractors of sorts, though I think that’s how PI’s generally work. Things move pretty quickly, as the genre tends to go, and when you combine the fast pace with noting the layout of the world and the sci-fi tech lore, you can easily lose your place in the story.

The facial proportions for the humans were realistic and flat, so the hand-drawn parts mixed well with CGI parts. On my first viewing, I got mixed up a few times between Aline and Jun, or Jun’s roommate—whichever murder victim had the blonde hair. It also didn’t help that Jun had an illegal doppelgänger android, since in Mars Express‘ legal environment, you can’t have a duplicate unless you’re dead. They don’t explain why but you can imagine all the mischief you could pull off if you could have your exact twin at your command.

Carlos, or rather Carlos’ posthumously-created android, made me think of modern robots and the uncanny valley problem we humans have with artificial faces. It would be much more user-friendly if robots had a holographic head that could easily mimic human facial expressions, instead of the overly-complicated material faces icking us all out. The technology for holographic projection for such use is mostly here, and even if it were at a low framerate it’s still much better than having to deal with Ameca or this monstrosity made of organic tissue.

The ending was a definite curveball. Leading up to the conclusion, there were a few scenes of obvious understandable collective pushback against the use of robots, but there were none of the usual philosophical or ethical dilemmas explored—”are robots actually…alive?” and whatnot. It’s neither here nor there, but the silence of ontological chatter was deafening—you expected it because of the premise, but it never came. There was even a competing technology with the organic robotics (even a high-powered spider-tank a la Ghost in the Shell in that regard) which was the driver for the antagonist to set the robot exodus in motion. Though, there was no trail leading up into the collective consciousness bit…it was all a ploy via corporate fraud to create demand for a new, untested technology. There were some ingredients present to make a statement, or at least pose an initial question, but it was never assembled. I don’t know if it was artistic inexperience on director Jérémie Périn’s part or if there’s was intention behind not saying much of what was expected.