Fantastic Film Fest 2024 Review - Mars Express
Images courtesy of Original Spin.
Mars Express feels rightfully ambivalent about its own rhetoric. Set in the near future on a Mars colony-for-elites, the film follows private detective Aline Ruby (voiced by Léa Drucker) as she spirals into the corrupt underworld of the capital city while she investigates a disappearance. It's a very familiar setup–especially as far as science-fiction and noir films go–but a familiarity that director and co-writer Jérémie Périn is keenly aware of, as he richly populates his film with the inferences of his world-building, building narratives that far extend beyond the core of the premise.
Unsurprisingly, many works of science-fiction wrestle with big, existential questions, and ostensibly Mars Express seems to do the same. The genesis of Aline Ruby’s investigation centres around the control over ‘jailbroken robots’ (androids who have had their consciousness freed); mass protests between humans and robots occupy the grounds and corporations seek to redefine what being alive truly means. And yet, Mars Express approaches these ideas with ambivalence. The film is less concerned advocating either for or against the integration of AI into human society, and more concerned reckoning with the fact that it is already here, integrated, and is far beyond our control. Technology is so fused with the function of the colony that it often feels unsettling to watch as both moments of triumph and evil are written with the same tools.
It’s astonishing, too, that Mars Express is a directorial debut, as Jérémie Périn deftly links his rhetoric with the visual aesthetic of the film. What makes it so riveting to watch is his enthusiasm for both the boundless potential that animation as a medium allows for and the tactility of live-action techniques; frames pop with colour and swerve with expressive motion, but are situated within a clinical art style that merges both drawn 2D and 3D animation to ground itself in realism. Action sequences are frequently punctuated by sudden violence, POV shots and faux-handheld camera movements to mimic the effect of a cameraman existing in this world, and Fred Avril and Philippe Monthaye’s pulsing synth score fills each scene with both texture and artifice. This all lays the foundation for the compelling character work, which has been written with moral ambiguity and contradiction, and further intensifies the hapless marriage between technology and humanity.
Behind the flashing neon lights, Mars Express’ messy and complicated core is a delight to unpack and crucially, is without the comfort of easy answers. While it’s not exactly reinventing the wheel, its entangled approach to familiar concepts positions it uniquely, and is well worth the price of admission.
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Mars Express is screening as part of Fantastic Film Festival Australia 2024. The festival runs from the 17th of April to the 10th of May, check out the festival website for tickets and more info here.