Recommendation | The Mars Express

Mars Express delivers everything you’d hope for from a science fiction movie. It’s enchanting, its pace is thrilling but not overstimulating and each character gives us a glimpse into a possible world. It is relatable and empathic without being melodramatic or overfixating on trauma. Also, its science fiction is carefully crafted. In every setting the film portrays, the script lays out a world filled with products and technologies that expand on existing trends. It offers new ideas and sparks the imagination, all while asking where do we even want products to evolve? What will they look like once they become old or irrelevant, and will a commercial space shuttle have enough bathrooms? If you’d like to watch Mars Express without spoilers, watch it before you read the next paragraph, because I have to talk about the plot.

The film is named after a fast flight, but the shuttle plays a minor role. The lead characters use it once in the beginning of the movie. Writer/director Jérémie Périn spoke about writing the screenplay while popular billionaires were discussing the need to go to Mars, and so, the film portrays a kind of Utopia by wealthy libertarians who’ve left Earth behind, reduced to a slum of unemployed people. But make no mistake, Périn isn’t trying to depict a dystopia. After a brief visit to an anti-robot protest for human labor rights on Earth, the movie takes us to the affluent society living under a dome on Mars. In doing so, it confronts us with one of the most threatening Freudian nightmares: the horror of getting exactly what we asked for.

Jérémie Périn, director of Mars Express, 2023

In the introduction to his short story collection Burning Chrome, William Gibson wrote that in order to write convincingly about the future, you need a compelling map of the past. That is the key to understanding Mars Express, a movie that asks where we come from and where we’re headed, as Earth represents our past and Mars poses the question – is this the future we want? The main subject the plot focuses on is labor. On Earth, work has been taken over by robots. On Mars, a megalomaniac billionaire is in the process of replacing metal robots with biological ones. The question is, will the metallic robots agree? By the end of the film, it’s revealed that the billionaire believes the only way to carry out this transition is by freeing the metal robots from the constraints of their programming, while at the same time convincing them that their future lies in space. In that sense, the billionaire resembles Lincoln, seeking to replace slaves with wage workers. He, too, was driven partially by an economic shift toward wage labor in the Northern states, but also hoped African-Americans would simply leave America and leave it white. The metaphor between robot rights and black civil rights, sometimes overused in science fiction, is expressed in the B-story of one of the main characters, Carlos Rivera, a back-up robot who contains the consciousness of a black man killed in a robot rebellion. He tries to make peace with his ex-wife so that he could see his daughter. Her new husband is a white cop, glad to take advantage of the fact that he can use violence against the robot, knowing it can’t fight back.

So, how are robots different from us? Mars Express explores this question in a variety of ways throughout the movie. The physical resemblance between robots and humans is emphasized in various scenes of dismemberment and robot attacks, where they spray a blood-like black fluid. The constant connection humans have with the network, including messages transmitted through a brain-computer interface, shortens the gap between humans and machines, causing both humans and robots at times to display a distant and confused look when engaged with something digital and intangible. Sexuality, freedom, addiction, work – all issues that both robots and humans grapple with throughout the film, in different ways.

Robots, the digital world, and Mars represent the direction we’re heading. But, the movie, which ends with a violent revolution by working class robots, confronts us with historical issues that technological progress cannot solve. We can try to escape our troubles by going to Mars, or through robotics or AI, but if we don’t solve them, they won’t go anywhere. Such questions are: who will do the work and how do we make sure they’re treated properly? What do we do with whoever technology left behind? How do we distribute resources fairly?

Aline Ruby, the main character, is a detective hired to find a missing girl. As is common in such films, the investigation leads her to uncover more and more of the rot at the heart of society, and eventually ask herself major questions. But her eyes can’t see far enough. They’re stuck on Chris Royjacker, the billionaire, who leads the robot breakthrough. Aline, Chris and Carlos were all in the military when the machines betrayed them. In the most intense scene in the film, Aline makes a desperate attempt to convince him to stop and put the genie back in the bottle, to ask the angel of history to stay put. She aims a gun at him when his bodyguards enter. Aline and Chris beg the bodyguards to drop their weapons, or she’ll kill him. But you can’t put a bullet in history’s head, and neither can you do that to capital. Just as the robots that killed Carlos weren’t driven by personal whims, but by the army that built them, the guards do not respect Chris’s life. They hold an urgent meeting, in which the board unanimously decide to kill Chris and Aline together to allow the plan to proceed. 

There’s no use in rushing toward the future, says Mars Express. It won’t save us from the past. As long as we remember that, we could settle a much slower shuttle to Mars.