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"A funny thing happened on the way to Mars." The great Space Age hoax, virtually a Frankenheimer Sixties fantasy properly adjusted to the Watergate Seventies. Out of the capsule and into the isolated airbase for the astronauts (James Brolin, Sam Waterston, O.J. Simpson), the Red Planet is a crumbly topography in a top-secret studio, enhanced with special effects for television broadcast. "There are people out there, forces out there, who have a lot to lose." Back home the wife (Brenda Vaccaro) demonstrates her pluck in the face of fabricated tragedy with a grave reading of Fox in Socks, the tenacious reporter (Elliott Gould) pursues his "cosmic scoop" and is nearly killed multiple times for his trouble. All the while, the cadets revolt against the deception only to find the endless desert waiting outside the hideaway. "Oh the marvels of American science. Here we are, millions of miles from the Earth, and we can still send out for a pizza." A curious joke with the punchline divulged at the onset, Peter Hyams builds on it with complicated and varied compositions informed by a wide variety of films (Planet of the Apes, His Girl Friday, Marooned, All the President's Men). An ascending crane on the rocky wasteland as the fugitives go their separate ways, a hurtling POV for the journalist's out-of-control car, the tiny speck of investigative light that is a door opening in a huge darkened hangar. Marauding helicopters enforce governmental skullduggery in a derivation from Losey's Figures in a Landscape, tell-tale home movies point to the preferred mode of mass manipulation, cf. Penn's Night Moves. "With that kind of technology, you could convince people of almost anything." Brooks scatters the satire in Wrong Is Right, Levinson bats cleanup with Wag the Dog. With Hal Holbrook, Karen Black, Telly Savalas, David Huddleston, David Doyle, Robert Walden, Lee Bryant, and Denise Nicholas.
--- Fernando F. Croce |