The Mars (2016): Review
Timing is everything, and “Mars,” a 6-episode experiment in hybridization that begins Monday on the National Geographic, feels as if it is landing at a particularly inopportune moment.
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The series, from Brian Grazer and Ron Howard, is half-fiction, half-documentary, mixing real-life interviews about the possibility of going to Mars with a fictional story set in 2033 about the first people to land there. It is hoping to rekindle the spirit of President John F. Kennedy’s call to go to the moon. But that would require an aspirational resolve that looks outward with hope and confidence. The series has its premiere at a moment when, in the United States at least, the presidential election has left many looking inward with snarls full of uncertainty.
“Mars” has conceptual problems in any case, though the attempt is interesting. The fictional half isn’t particularly sophisticated as space odysseys go. A crew of six is arriving at Mars as it opens, and there’s trouble during the landing that leaves the commander (Ben Cotton) injured and the ship a long way from its intended touchdown spot.
We’re conditioned to expect impressive special effects in a space story, but don’t look for many here. In the first two episodes, at least, the crew spends a lot of time either staring with alarm at video screens or marching across the barren Martian landscape. Some effort is made to give the crew members back stories, though in the early going it’s focused mostly on the commander (whom we see as a child in flashbacks) and the mission pilot, whose twin sister is part of the team monitoring the flight back on Earth. (The singer and composer JiHae plays both roles.)
Where the series gets sometimes intriguing, sometimes awkward, is in the shifts to documentary mode. The idea is to have present-day Mars enthusiasts explain the challenges scientists are grappling with as they contemplate a mission to Mars even as we’re seeing the fictional crew of 2033 encounter those challenges.
“The trip to Mars is a long trip, seven months,” says Norm Knight, a NASA official. “And we have to understand: What does it mean for an astronaut to be in orbit for that amount of time?”
The strain on astronauts’ bodies; the harshness of the Martian environment; the technical problems of building a landing base robotically, so there’s a habitat for the first humans — those and more are among the issues discussed, and these segments are illuminating. Less welcome are the ones that sound like promotional videos for NASA or for SpaceX, the space transport and exploration company founded by Elon Musk, who is a frequent presence here. At least these portions don’t gloss over things; we see the failures of the agency and the company along with their successes.
The whole enterprise is short on sophistication, as if it’s aimed at high school students with an interest in science. Nothing wrong with that, of course, since that’s the age group that would have to become interested enough to carry an actual Mars mission forward.
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