The Thousands

Geoff Marslett’s Mars is a science fiction, romantic comedy live-action animation. Nominally rotoscoped, it feels more like Ralph Bakshi’s Lord of the Rings than Richard Linklater’s A Scanner Darkly. Though it does share a particular indefinable sense of Austinness associated with Linklater’s early work. A meandering, unfocussed slacker aesthetic also associated with mumblecore.

The plot involves inexplicably Russian janitors at NASA who are also, even more inexplicably, in charge of loading a Mars rover onto a rocket. A trio of astronauts sent to Mars (including Mark Duplass of The Puffy Chair and Humpday). Kinky Friedman as the stogie chomping POTUS, the possibility of martian life caused by a cough, romance and half-hearted stabs at humour. It’s about as tightly plotted as I am making it sound.

The aesthetic is puzzling. Making everything look as if someone got Roy Liechtenstein interested in science fiction, took away his paint and told him to go nuts with the posterize filter in photoshop instead. Though it was made with a tiny budget and involved years of post-production and animation one cannot award points for effort. The likes of Clerks, π and, indeed, Slacker are great films first, economic curiosities second. My instinct was to call the film ‘weird’. But it’s not. It’s a scatterbrained  experiment of the “let’s put on a show” school with a veneer of weird. And though it might not exactly earn the right to all the non sequiturs and cul-de-sacs of its narrative and dialogue it is certainly unique. Joyful in its way.