The Martian Chronicles [TV] (1980)
Directed by Michael Anderson

Film Review

The Martian Chronicles is the most celebrated of Ray Bradbury's literary achievements, a collection of short stories which form a loose narrative detailing man's colonisation of the planet Mars in the first decade of the 21st century.  In common with the best offerings in the science-fiction genre, the book is not a prediction of future events (evidenced by the fact that a manned expedition to Mars is still many years away from us and may in fact never happen), but an allegory of present realities on Earth, drawn from the writer's own personal preoccupations.  What concerned Bradbury most in the 1940s and 1950s and inspired him to write his most famous work was the destructive impact of crass materialism on humanity's better qualities - creativity, respect for the environment, respect for one's own culture and that of other races, etc.  Reading The Martian Chronicles today, it is surprising how much of a resonance it has.  Its prescience lies not in its fanciful account of the colonisation of another world, but in its bleak anticipation of what mankind is destined to become.

Attempts to adapt The Martian Chronicles have defied filmmakers since the 1950s and it wasn't until the late 1970s that a British-American consortium of companies, including the BBC and Charles Fries Productions, made a first stab at it with an ambitious three-part mini-series which ran to four and a half hours.  The timing for this most ambitious of television ventures could hardly be better.  Science-fiction on the big and small screens was enjoying a massive boom, in the wake of the worldwide success of Star Wars (1977) and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977).  The viewing public just couldn't get enough sci-fi and The Martian Chronicles was sure to attract immense audiences around the world.  With a stellar cast headed by iconic actor Rock Hudson, the series that consisted of three feature-length episodes was hyped as the television event of the decade.  Of course, it was destined to be a total misfire. 

The most obvious weakeness of the production was that it relied on special effects to be convincing, and the sad fact was that effects technology was still very much in its infancy.  Without the astronomical budget of a major Hollywood blockbuster, any science-fiction drama made for television was inevitably going to fall short of expectations.  After witnesses the spectacular effects in Star Wars, television audiences were unlikely to impressed by the amateurish model work and sloppy post production offered by The Martian Chronicles.  (The Martian exteriors were filmed on Malta and Lanzarote and no attempt was made to treat the film to remove the bright blue skies and fluffy white clouds that totally spoil the illusion.)   Things get off to a bad start with real footage of one of the Apollo missions switching to an unconvincing shot of a plastic toy rocket flying through a poor imitation of space.  The first scene on Mars, with bald, gold-eyed aliens resembling something from a 1950s comic strip, looks like something Ed Wood may have knocked up in his garage, studio-bound schlock that makes the first series of Star Trek (made 13 years previously) look bold and sophisticated.  The design, effects and direction all conspire to create an impression of cheapness and ineptitude, right from the beginning of this supposed television milestone.  Even the early black and white episodes of Lost in Space look good compared with this.

It does get a little better as things progress.  The account of the Second Expedition is somewhat more involving (partly because there are no effects involved and it has a contemporary Earth setting) and there is a genuine eerie quality about it.  Thereon, it's a pretty patchy affair, with occasional moments of brilliance sandwiched between long, wearying deserts of godawfulness.  The series' absolute nadir is its one excursion into outright comedy, with an incredibly unlikeable Christopher Connelly chasing after the last woman on Mars to find that she is even more nauseating than he is.  This is followed by an equally toe-curling episode in which Darren McGavin (the most irritating actor in the entire production) is chased by Martians in the manner of a cheap western, with ludicrous model shots destroying the illusion totally.  Fritz Weaver's close encounter with celestial balls delivers another low-point and an excuse for some pious waffle that makes viewing with a sick bag mandatory.  These leaps into the abyss of mediocrity would be tolerable if the rest of the production was up to scratch, but unfortunately it isn't.  The Martian Chronicles is an arduous trudge across a drawn-out pedestrian narrative which is as arid, airless and unappealing as the Martian surface itself.

It's easy to blame it all on the effects technology that was available at the time, but there were plenty of sci-fi and fantasy television shows of this era which managed to make respectable viewing with primitive special effects.  It's tempting to blame the writer Richard Matheson, that veteran of the sci-fi genre whose screenwriting efforts never matched up to the brilliance of his published novels.  The dialogue may be appalling in parts, but Matheson does a reasonable job of imposing a narrative structure on Bradbury's loosely connected short stories.  It's easier to lambaste the actors, most of whom seem to have no idea what planet they're on, let alone who they are supposed to be playing.  All of the above must share some of the blame for this monumental disaster but the real culprit is its director, Michael Anderson, who was the kiss of death to just about every genre film he came within spitting distance of.

Anderson was presumably hired to direct the film when his previous sci-fi atrocity Logan's Run (1976) had proven to be a surprise hit at the box office (igniting the sci-fi camp fire that Star Wars would turn into a raging conflagration).  Before this, Anderson had scored a hit with Around the World in 80 Days (1956) and was still revered for his patriotic wartime drama The Dam Busters (1954).  Anderson was certainly a competent film director who, when given a straight drama, seldom failed to deliver the goods.  But when tasked with something requiring subtlety, flair and imagination, he was way out of his depth, as is painfully evident in almost every shot of The Martian Chronicles.  Imagine how much greater this series might have been if Steven Spielberg or George Lucas had been entrusted with it.  Giving it to Anderson was like putting a blind psychotic elephant in charge of a three-week old baby.  It was bound to have ended up as a dawdling monstrosity, a life-sapping endurance test that strains the patience of even the most committed sci-fi enthusiast.  The combined effect of Anderson's lumbering direction, poor special effects and a lacklustre script doused with outbursts of tedious sermonising is not one for the faint-hearted or the easily bored.  The Martian Chronicles is definitely not classic sci-fi.  It is an Ozymandias-like monument to the hubris of television executives.

Film Synopsis

In 1999, Zeus I, the first manned mission to Mars, ends in disaster when the two-man crew are killed by a native Martian to protect his world.  It is not long before a second mission is launched, and this time the crew are surprised when they arrive not in the expected rocky wilderness, but in a perfect replica of a small Illinois town.  They are met by their family members, unaware that this is just a ruse by the Martians to trap them and lure them to their deaths.  Colonel John Wilder leads the third expedition a few years later and discovers that all of the native Martians have been wiped out by a chickenpox epidemic caused by the previous expeditions. Astronaut  Jeff Spender discovers remnants of the Martian civilisation and turns against his fellow crewmembers, determined to prevent man from desecrating another world.  Over the next few years, mass colonisation of Mars is underway, with small American-like towns springing up all over the planet.  One of the members of the third expedition, Sam Parkhill, has opened a diner, expecting to profit from the urban growth around him.  He is visited by some of the last surviving Martians, who grant him ownership of half of the planet's surface.   Parkhill's dreams of untold wealth turn to dust when he witnesses the destruction of Earth in the fireball of a nuclear war...