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Once in the village, the Martian SWAT guys find Williams in his cell as well as a few villagers while the rest of them will reappear later as angry zombies. It seems that one movie after the other, Carpenter is worn-out, like an old battery, exploiting his favorite themes with less inspiration. The recent Village of the Damned, Escape from LA and Vampires are nothing but pastiches of his early work, giving you the strange feeling he is an over-estimated director. While some of his old movies such as The Thing may prove otherwise, it is not even certain that the producers still have faith in him. This might explain that all of his latest films include his name in the titles—John Carpenter's Ghosts of Mars, John Carpenter's Vampires—probably a ploy to attract his core audience in theaters unless it's just an ego thing. Ghosts of Mars looks in many ways like Vampires, from the elite team fighting evil to the western setting and the makeup, the main difference being character development. Whereas in Vampires they were not very subtle, they were at least alive. In Ghosts of Mars, characters are just weak one-dimensional sketches without any secrets: Melanie is married to her job, "Desolation" Williams is the cool bad boy and Jericho Butler (Jason Statham) is a sex maniac. Vampires was mediocre, Ghosts of Mars is bad. Like in one-person shooter Doom alike games where you have to gun down scary armed monsters, the audience's only pleasure is in the large-scale gory slaughter of bad creatures. Ballard's teammates are being decimated one after the other just like in Aliens and Predator, where screenplays and skillful shots created suspense and a unique atmosphere. Here, the story bears too many flashbacks in the flashback, a repetitive and clumsy process that kills any suspense. As for the ending, it is scandalously too easy. The actors play their parts loaded with testosterone. Natasha Henstridge pulls through in her sanitized role of an icy (lesbian?) blonde while Ice Cube is singing rap. I almost want to say that the best actor is "Big Daddy Mars", the pierced chief of the ghost minors who looks like Marilyn Manson after a car crash and sounds like he's eating marshmallows when he talks. The movie that takes place on Mars could just as well take place in the West. All the elements of the western are here: gunfights and good old train as in Once upon a time in the West; dynamite, jail and a shelter surrounded by villains as in Rio Bravoâ& We just need Dimitri Tiomkin's music, but instead Carpenter composed his own score with heavy metal, adding to the subtlety of the whole. Obviously, Carpenter's goal is not to deliver a message, even though B-movies such as They Live were political vehicles. Carpenter mostly likes to play with our fears and our senses in sci-fi and horror movies. But as a horror film, Ghosts of Mars definitely fails. Slow and laborious it is nothing but a TV movie you'll watch without paying attention. The omnipresent sensation that Carpenter is taking this very seriously annihilates any hope that the project is just a parody. A brainless and boring film, Ghosts of Mars is a real bad John Carpenter's film that one prefers to ignore in the filmography of Halloween's director.
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