Ghosts of Mars (2001)

I'm mystified by the glowing reviews of this movie. I can't see any redeeming qualities about it. It's both boring and nonsensical. And it's not even scary.

Another JOHN CARPENTER movie that is so underrated it's SILLY,like most of his BRILLIANT films they are always underrated & hated on to a ridiculous degree & then like 20 yrs later are rediscovered as lost classic's? Anyway i liked this AWESOME sci-fi Thriller from the very beginning in 2001 when i first rented it on video, i absolutely Love the Atmosphere in this just like carpenter does with his films he creates a scary dread filled atmosphere & here it's lonely setting on mars at an abandoned mining base is really creepy & unsettling. The cast is cool with the likes of ICE CUBE, JASON STATHAM,PAM GRIER & NATASHA HENSRIDGE are all great in their roles i really liked Jason Statham in this early role as a tough security officer before he became a Hollywood action hero. This is a relatively low budget movie compared to the main big movies that Hollywood make but it's great quality & has an excellent setting & really scary voodoo type crazy ancient alien spirits that possess people & turn them into crazy warriors who kill anyone, it's great fun & has very good FX & really well made production design & like i said the empty doom filled atmosphere is excellent & you just want them to hide in a room & board it all up because out there is TERRIFYING!!! So yes Carpenter has made another great film in the mould of ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13 & ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK, it has that feel. Quick story bit, a team of government security officers are sent to pick up a wanted Criminal & transport him back but find there is something very bad happening at the mining colony!!! a very exciting thrill ride with another excellent carpenter score!!! Also the futuristic train the team ride in in AWESOME looking great design & the officers uniforms look great all excellent production design!!! A great fun late night sci-fi Thriller with Horror & excitement just good fun

I just watched this on Starz, so it was uncut, and before I got very far into it, I had to come here and see what others thought of it. I'm surprised at all the apologists for John Carpenter. "It will be a classic in another decade." Um, no.First, the plot (something out of Mars' past has been released and is affecting the human colonists) is actually a very good idea. Heck, the general story itself wasn't bad. But the implementation, from the exposition (having the LT describe what happened) to the dialog to the silly battle scenes (the individual fight scenes in close quarters were actually quite good) was just mediocre. It doesn't help that Ice Cube can NOT act. When he runs into the fight randomly firing machine pistols out to each side with no attempt to aim or conserve ammo, I groaned audibly.The idea that the LT's drugs could help fight off the "ghosts" was pretty good, and should have been explored. As a Jason Statham fan, I was disappointed at how wasted he was in his role in "Ghosts."This could have been another "The Thing" if Carpenter hadn't wanted to have a fighting free-for-all. No, Carpenter has never had a hit movie, but he has made a few films that are very worthy of re-watches. This isn't one of them.

Another nail in the coffin of John Carpenter's long-dead career, this braindead action romp is an empty offering missing all the right spots and ending up as an oh-so-predictable seen-it-all-before mess of a movie. Sure, it's pretty enough; the Martian landscapes, bathed in red, are impressively portrayed for the film's budget and the night shooting gives it an extra level of atmosphere it might otherwise have missed. Unfortunately, the visuals are all that this film offers. After some effective scene-building, it becomes yet another us vs. them gung-ho action epic with the heroes shooting hundreds of bullets and using martial arts to destroy the zombie-like bad guys. Not that I'm against action, but this is so suspenseless and uninteresting that I have no choice but to complain.Carpenter seems to think that excitement equals shooting loads of action really fast and intercut, so the action bits are over really quickly. For the best example, look at the difference between this film and his '70s classic ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13. The latter was dark, brooding, mysterious, and exciting, because Carpenter let the audience take their time to get to know the characters before bombarding them with increasingly elaborate scenes of action. The film was low budget, the action scenes limited in scope, but nonetheless it has ten times the impact of this glossy, overblown effort with not one element of suspense in it whatsoever. The only good things about the fight scenes are some groovy gore FX (including a couple of nifty decapitations by frisbee) but these are over so quickly as to be unsatisfying. The score, which sounds like a dirge all the way through, is so out of place in this film (or any), that it's astonishing for Carpenter to misjudge this key element so badly.The film's foes are quite interesting but sadly nothing is ever made of their alien personalities, they just become faceless attackers, zombie-like in the worst sense. Carpenter builds up the mystery by showing some alien artwork (metal implements arranged into bizarre hanging displays) and has an interesting, original element in the body piercing done by the aliens on their bodies, perhaps to disfigure themselves to show their hatred of the human form. But their origins and motivation are never explored. Heads on sticks are a concurrent theme but the effects here are cheap-looking and Carpenter cribs his first shock scene (the hanging bodies) from PREDATOR 2. I had to laugh at the cheap CGI aliens who appear in a flashback dream, their features masked by overlaying the image of somebody's face, wish we could have seen more of their cheesiness.Natasha Henstridge leads a cast of uninteresting two-dimensional characters through this movie. Henstridge is dreadful and upstaged by Ice Cube, himself putting in a lazy performance which is nonetheless the best in the movie. British actor Jason Stratham is wasted in the sidelines as a hard-as-nails sergeant whilst blaxploitation icon Pam Grier looks awful in a silly wig and is killed off almost straight away. Add into the brew ludicrous character names like Jericho, Desolation, and most unforgivably "Big Daddy" and you have an idea that the scriptwriters didn't give a damn. You won't either. Thumbs down to this vapid enterprise in effects and no magic.