Aelita: Queen of Mars (1924), by Soviet director Yakov Protazanov, envisioned Mars as an autocratic dystopia, whereas Cold War-era Hollywood produced a rash of red-baiting Mars movies such as Red Planet Mars (1952). The genre's long fall from innocence perhaps began when it became tinged with political ideology. The Minotaur metaphor is also echoed in the name given by scientists to a tangle of deep canyons near the Martian equator: the Labyrinth of Night.Ĭelestial fantasies in movies are almost as old as celluloid: Méliès shot Voyage to the Moon in 1902 eight years later Enrico Movelli made Un matrimonio interplanetario (An interplanetary marriage) about an earthbound astronomer smitten with the daughter of his Martian counterpart. Anger cast himself as the 'Boy-Elect from Earth', an adolescent who is rocketed to Mars, where he 'awakens in a labyrinth littered with the bones of his predecessors'. As a pre-teen, Kenneth Anger made Prisoner of Mars (1942), marrying poetry to pulp by collapsing the Minotaur myth into a Flash Gordon story. ![]() It's fitting that our dusty neighbour has been equated with the labyrinth, that metaphor for the unconscious treasured by the Surrealists. Carpenter's scenario implicitly acknowledges the planet's hold on the popular imagination, as did Tim Burton's delirious spoof Mars Attacks! (1996) and, more resonantly, Paul Verhoeven's Total Recall (1990), which depicted Mars as a nightmarish mining colony and the source of powerful repressed memories. Meanwhile John Carpenter's Ghosts of Mars (2001), which pits humans against vengeful long-dead aliens, is the latest in a stream of new Mars movies. Numerous groups are making plans for colonization. NASA's Mars 2001 Odyssey orbiter will arrive in October, and the European Union's Mars Express orbiter is scheduled to depart in 2003 with Britain's Beagle 2 probe on board. The Martian frontier is closer than ever.
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