Up to a point, if you strip away the ragged pseudo-rotoscope and all of the sci-fi elements from Geoff Marslett’s debut feature Mars, you might be left with almost the same film – that is, until the titular red planet comes into view from the spaceship windows. Marslett’s Mars is more than a destination or flimsy deux ex machina - it is the living, beating heart of this casual romantic comedy that embraces all lovers, human, robot or alien, into its orbit.
America in 2015 is a strange place: alt-country star Kinky Friedman is the president, and NASA’s space program is manned the sons and daughters of Slacker. When a Mars rover malfunctions, NASA send a trio of cosmonauts to discover what is really happening out on the red planet; Hank (Paul Gordon), Casey (Zoe Simpson) and Charlie (mumblecore hero Mark Duplass). Charlie used to have The Right Stuff on the spacewalk scene but on this trip he just coasts along, slouching around cross-stitching rhinestones and a cape onto his custom spacesuit, or phoning in to a z-grade tabloid TV show back on Earth. As the trio get closer to the red planet, Hank spills the beans regarding the secrecy of the mission, so Charlie and Zoe must descend to the surface to discover if there really is love on Mars...
Between teaching animation full-time and fronting a kung-fu rock band, Marslett found the time to shoot Mars entirely before a green screen on an Austin sound stage for only $450,000 – he even created the DOS program that processes the footage to create the roto-esque look. Marslett confronts genre tradition not with subversion, but with a too-cool-for-school shrug that recalls Carpenter’s Dark Star, and is carried along by an appropriate comic-book aesthetic. The laid-back chemistry between Charlie and Zoe is endearing despite the faux-roto keeping us at arms length, however, their snappy sarcasm grates as the boredom of extended space travel sets in. While the green screen allows Marslett a high degree of freedom with backgrounds, the actors feel often removed from their environment, and only when the film arrives on Mars does the animation edge into the similar dream-like territory of Linklater’s cine-lecture Waking Life, as we are introduced to smitten alien critters and robots that do not dream of electric sheep, but zeroes and ones.
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