New Mars

What’s the best way to raise Mars’ profile in the public? Stuart Atkinson believes that, quite literally, we need to place it in the public eye with a visual extravaganza named Mars - The Movie. And to give the red planet the justice that wasn’t given to it by certain recent movies, it will naturally be filmed on IMAX…

No-one has ever seen Mars. I mean really seen it.

It’s been more than 30 years since those first close-up, grainy pictures of Mars came in from Mariner 9, but despite three decades of glossy astronomy magazine articles, 3D National Geographic specials and Discovery Channel documentaries, none of us have ever actually seen Mars as it deserves to be seen.

As it is.

True, the photographs taken by Pathfinder and Global Surveyor are stunning, more impressive I think than any of us dared hope for when we watched those probes setting of from Earth. But it doesn’t matter how big they’re blown-up in Astronomy or Sky and Telescope, they’ll always be just that - pictures: flat, two-dimensional images. Just as no photo, however artistically framed or composed, can ever hope to do justice to the breathtaking vistas of the Grand Canyon or the vertical grandeur of Yosemite, no photo can ever really put us there on Mars. All we’ve had so far are glimpses of a world as seen through cold, electronic eyes. No spaceprobe photo could ever begin to give us even a hint of what it would be like for a human being to stand on the Red Planet and see it with their own, wide-with-wonder eyes.

And that experience is, I am absolutely convinced, what is needed before the General Public - or The People, or Everyone Else, or whatever you want to call them - will start to take a real interest in, and actively lobby for, the manned exploration of Mars. Until then Mars will remain an abstract concept. We have to make it a Real Place.

A major part of making people appreciate Mars as a real place is convincing them that it’s survivable. Thanks to Hollywood, Mars has a very bad public image. Think about it. Every movie set on Mars has portrayed it as a nightmare world, a Tarantino version of the Arizona desert. Consequently, millions of people now think Mars is simply a cold, dust-bowl world covered with rocks, where all but one of any party of exploring astronauts would die, horribly, leaving a lone survivor to head back to Earth hurling abuse and curses at the lethal red world receding behind him or her.

Well-meaning white-coated scientists don’t help either. They tell people, again and again, how Mars is a dead world, devoid of life, before adding “but it may have had life long ago”. Too late, the damage has already been done. Again.

So today, when the public hear the word “Mars” they hear the sound of howling winds and hissing sand, and they see a desolate brick-red landscape and astronauts dying in agony through asphyxiation, explosive decompression, or worse.

Mars needs a makeover.

But how can we achieve that? It’s an impossible task, surely, to make somewhere as far away and as - literally - alien as Mars, seem real to people who never travel further than an economy airline ticket will take them. If NASA videos, 3D photos and the best efforts of Mars advocates the world over have all failed, what could possibly succeed?

A movie, that’s what.

I know what you’re thinking - that I’m contradicting myself, right? Didn’t I say just a few paragraphs ago how lousy Mars movies have been? Yes, I did, and they have. Let’s be honest here. With the possible exception of the conspiracy thriller Capricorn One, all the attempts at putting Mars up there on the silver screen so far have been catastrophic failures, hang-your-heads-in-shame disgraces to both Mars exploration and the art of cinema. Rather than galvanise it, they have probably reduced public interest in, and support for, the space program.

The two most recent disasters, Red Planet and Mission to Mars, served Mars advocates very, very badly. Leaving aside their dreadful storylines, unbelievable, cliche-ridden characters and dodgy science, both movies gave their audiences unconvincing, and worse, inaccurate and unrealistic portrayals of the planet itself. In both of them it was clear to anyone who’d ever glanced at a Viking or Pathfinder picture that Mars was just a terrestrial desert somewhere, filmed through a red filter. Val Kilmer was obviously being chased by that psychotic robot across the Arizona desert. And as for the mummyesque, astronaut-devouring dust storm in Mission, well, let’s just say that Capricorn One’s ‘Mars’, which was actually shown to be in a sound studio, was more convincing. Shame on you Mr. De Palma, shame on you.

Fact: no movie yet made has even come close to portraying the beauty and grandeur of Mars.

But one recent blockbuster film has proved that movies can re-educate people, and proved also that both Red Planet and Mission to Mars were woefully lost opportunities. Almost overnight, The Lord of the Rings transformed the public’s perception of New Zealand. Before Frodo and the other members of the Fellowship were shown riding across huge grassy plains and striding along vertigo-inducing mountain ridges most people thought New Zealand was just a miniature version of Australia, but knee-deep in sheep. Now everyone knows that NZ is breathtakingly beautiful, and people - even non-geeks who can’t speak elvish - are flocking there in their thousands to see it for themselves.

Could a movie give Mars a similar makeover? Could a Peter Jackson or James Cameron tour-de-force give human Mars exploration the CPR it so desperately needs?

Possibly. No. Definitely. But it’s not going to happen. Most will agree that Kim Stanley Robinson’s epic Mars trilogy is the only work of Mars fiction which could possibly show the real Mars; there are no other stories out there grand enough to deserve the The Lord of the Rings or Titanic treatment. But having seen Frank Herbert’s masterpiece Dune brutally murdered on screen not just once but twice, I’m convinced that Kim’s wonderful books would be too difficult and too expensive to film. And I’d much rather see them not filmed at all than filmed badly. Wouldn’t you?

So no, a movie is not going to be the vehicle that transports the Man or Woman In The Street to Mars.

Well, not a traditional movie, anyway…

In dozens of amusement parks, museums and science centres in towns and cities around the globe, men, women and children are being transported to incredible locations, and enjoying amazing experiences, each and every single day. They’re seeing things they never dared dream they’d see; experiencing sensations and emotions with an intensity they never imagined possible.

Anyone can do it. I did it myself just a couple of weeks ago. Twice.

First I went up into space for a brief stay at the International Space Station. I space-walked over the hull, helped repair the Hubble Telescope, then paused to look over the edge of the station and down at the Earth’s oceans 250 miles below me. Half an hour later I was falling down, deep down to the inky depths of one of those oceans, to the wreck of the Titanic. I swam through the rusted corpse of the great ship in complete safety, peering through panes of stained glass which hadn’t been seen by human eyes for almost a century.

And no, I wasn’t staring at a super-fast computer simulation, or immersing myself in virtual reality cyber-world via wraparound monitor visors or data gloves. All I had to do was lower myself into a soft, high-backed chair, in a cathedral-like gallery, surrounded by hundreds of other acolytes, and stare up at a screen so big it looked like the sail of an ocean-crossing galleon from a century ago. And then, sat there with my 3D glasses on, oblivious to the outside, so-called “real” world, I really felt like I could reach out with my hand and touch Hubble’s meteoroid-pitted skin, or set swaying the Titanic’s iconic shattered-crystal chandelier

Forget the world of the Matrix Neo. Welcome to the breathtaking world of IMAX.

IMAX has, I believe, amazing potential in our fight to get public opinion behind the exploration of Mars. Anyone who’s ever been to an IMAX presentation - and I’m sure most NewMars readers have - will agree that it’s a unique, sometimes overwhelming experience, a visual and aural assault which “normal” cinema can’t hope to compete with. If you haven’t been to your local IMAX cinema yet, then let me tell you why you should go.

My local IMAX cinema, at Rheged near Penrith, is like a place of pilgrimage to me, and - apart from being located underground! - it’s fairly typical of IMAX theatres. Specially composed music blares from state of the art sound systems as crystal-clear 70mm images are projected onto a huge matt silver screen, which the leaflet says is five storeys high but your brain insists must actually be the size of a small playing field. It’s so big that even from the back row you have to tilt your head back, or pan left and right, to see it all. Experienced IMAX junkies like myself rush to stake claim to the seats in the centre of the middle rows, because from there the screen fills your field of view, and for the duration of the show you’re not in a cinema at all, you are wherever the screen is showing.

As if that wasn’t enough, many IMAX presentations are in 3D, and the effect is truly breathtaking. The depth of field is outrageous; when things come out of the screen, they ARE going to hit you, there’s absolutely no doubt about it. You duck, everyone ducks, everyone laughs and feels stupid. But you keep ducking; the effect is so realistic.

The whole point of IMAX - and the reason why it can help us in our task - is that it takes people to places, and lets them experience things, they could never hope to see, or do, for real. Want to fly down the Grand Canyon but can’t afford the chopper fare? No problem, IMAX will take you there. Want to surf hundred-foot high waves, or swim with dolphins, or haul yourself up to the summit of Everest? IMAX will take you there, too.

IMAX can even take you back in time. An IMAX ticket will secure you a berth on the doomed ship Endurance to let you accompany explorer Earnest Shackleton on his ill-fated expedition to the pole. Too recent for you? Well, okay, then you can plunge backwards in time to the age of the dinosaurs, to peer deep into the mouth of a T-REX? Or, if that’s a little too exciting, how about a more sedate excursion - a flight over the ancient pyramids of Egypt, perhaps?

Or how about leaving the real world completely behind? IMAX can take you to nightmarish worlds stalked by gigantic Terminator-esque metallic spiders, or even to the Earth’s core on the ultimate rollercoaster ride -

You get the idea.

Quite simply, IMAX cinemas are real-life Stargates to other worlds - both the fantasy worlds of our imaginations, and the strange-but-true other worlds which exist here on Earth.

And they can take us to Mars too, if we give them the chance.

I believe that before July 20th 2006 - the 30th anniversary of the first Viking landing on the Red Planet - the Mars Society should commit itself to producing, or funding the production of, an IMAX film which takes audiences on a trip to Mars and then on a flight over its surface.

Such a film would be expensive, no doubt, but the cost would be worth it. A dedicated Mars IMAX film would reach thousands if not millions of people worldwide, and bring Mars to the attention of people who had never even seen it in the night sky before. An IMAX film which took people to, and flew them over Mars would bring the Red Planet and its landscapes to life in a way that no photograph, no slick NASA video or computer simulation could ever do.

How?

Ideally, Mars - The Movie would use 3D footage filmed by an IMAX camera actually on Mars, flown there as a spaceprobe’s dedicated or piggy-backed payload, but I realise that the sheer size and bulk of the cameras makes that very unlikely. That will change in time of course, as miniaturisation marches relentlessly on, but for now the best we can hope for is a film using a combination of existing spaceprobe photography - Pathfinder, Global Surveyor etc. All the major unmanned probes being sent to Mars over the next few years will also carry cameras, so we can use their photos too. Perhaps most exciting of all, the proposed ARES Mars Plane will have a digital video camera onboard, which is expected to take stunning footage as the drone flies down the Mariner Valley…

And what we can’t photograph or film directly, we can recreate digitally - but always, always accurately, with no vertical-stretching or scale-exaggeration. Computer-generated imagery from 21st century digital artists such as Kees Veenenbos, whose work has been featured here on NewMars, could show areas of Mars as they would appear through a spacecraft window. Animators could bring the Mars Base paintings of Robert McCall and Ron Miller to life. There’s nothing we couldn’t show. Literally nothing.

But Mars - The Movie would have to show more than just photo-realistic landscapes and impressive space-age hardware. Tastes have changed. 21st century movie - and TV - audiences want human drama, conflict and triumph over adversity, too. As much as we’d like them to, today’s Reality TV-devouring audiences don’t want the sterilised, gleaming world of 2001: A Space Odyssey; they want Survivor on Mars.

Caution is required here though, because as much as people yearn for that kind of escapism, they most definitely don’t want to be misled or outright lied to either. We have to be careful not to put spin on the story. The truth is fascinating, exciting and terrifying enough on its own without any embroidery. There should be no evangelical talk of colonisation, settlement or terraforming, just genuine enthusiasm for and belief in the worth of exploration and the search for life.

In this troubled time when the old terror of World War has been replaced by fears of subways disabled by dirty bombs, skyscrapers cleaved in two by hijacked airliners and shopping malls ripped apart by suicide bombers, people want desperately to be told there is a future, and that it will be brighter than the present.

Mars offers just such a brighter future - a target for not just one nation but all nations to aim for.

Hollywood has had several chances to show the human drama of exploring Mars, and has blown it every time. It’s our turn. And we can use our expertise, science backgrounds and sincere belief in the future to do it right.

We can show the Truth: a weary mission commander struggling to erect a flag in the frozen martian surface; her team members toiling behind her, building the first Mars base; one of the explorers bounding across the ruddy, rock-strewn landscape towards a stricken and familiar old friend, kneeling down beside the dust-covered, belly-up Sojourner rover and setting it back on its spiky wheels once more - and we can show such sentimental scenes without shame because we know in our hearts that one day they’ll be played out for real.

We can start planning Mars - The Movie, now, today. The pieces are all in place. And let’s face it, we need to try something new because nothing we’ve tried so far has worked; people Out There simply aren’t “turned on” enough by Mars today to want to fund a mission there with their taxes. And until they are, nothing with a pulse or a heartbeat is going to Mars.

Need more convincing? Fine. Look to the sky…

This August the Red Planet will be closer to Earth - and therefore brighter in the night sky - than at any time in the last 57 thousand years. Just as happened in 1986 when Halley’s Comet graced our skies, telescope sales will soar, bookshop shelves will sag under the weight of rushed-out astronomy and sky-watching books, and thousands of astronomical societies around the globe will show Mars to millions of people. Documentaries and re-runs of the aforementioned dreadful Mars movies will clog the TV schedules, and you’ll never be more than a turn of a radio dial away from a repeat performance of Orson Welles’ historic War Of The Worlds mockumentary. Mars Fever will grip the world - and all this four months before the British Beagle 2 and twin US Mars Exploration Rovers even reach Mars..!

What better time for us to commit to a project which could make a real difference to public opinion, than when the target of our hopes and dreams is blazing in the sky like a beacon, for all to see?

So. Imagine this… It’s July 20th 2006, and across the world thousands and thousands of people are taking their seats in IMAX cinemas for the co-ordinated premiere of Mars - The Movie. You’re one of them, staring up expectantly at that enormous silver screen just like the hundreds of people around you. The lights go down, and as you put on your 3D shades the music rises up around you and the show begins… First you’re orbiting the planet, looking down on its plains and mountains, ice caps and craters… the screen is so big that Mars is all you can see, that and the inky blackness of space around it. All your senses are telling you that you’re there, you’re really there, above Mars, looking down on it from the craft which has been your home for the past six months. Then you’re dropping down towards the planet, the craters are growing larger before your eyes, larger and larger, and you think you’re going to smash into the surface like the Polar Lander did, but at the last moment you pull up and are racing over the surface… craters pass below you in an orange and tan blur…

Suddenly a bump appears on the horizon up ahead, a bump which gradually turns into a huge rocky blister, and with your heart jumping into your mouth you realise that you’re approaching Olympus Mons, the biggest volcano in the solar system. An amazing slow fly-around of the great volcano’s soaring cliffs is followed by a chair arm-gripping dive down into the gaping maw of the caldera, before you jink sideways and head south…

Now Valles Marineris - not just Mars’ but the entire solar system’s Grand Canyon - beckons you, and although you know it’s impossible your brain - and your heaving stomach - tells you that you’re dropping down into it, down, down, down past sheer, crumbling, layered walls, down, down towards the dune-covered valley floor… now you’re racing east, along the canyon floor, and rock faces ten times as high as El Capitan loom up on either side of you as you fly over mesas, buttes and landslides… Time is accelerated, shadows lengthen and colours deepen as the shrunken Sun drops towards the horizon up ahead. Around you tan rock turns to orange, orange to gold, gold to brown… then the Sun has gone, swallowed up by the canyon’s depths, and you begin to rise again, climbing up out of the shadowy abyss -

You clear the edge of the mighty canyon, and something makes you look west, to where the sky is glowing a dozen different shades of red, purple and plum - and there you see, shining above the jagged horizon like a beacon, a dazzling blue star… Earth…

We’ve all imagined those scenes ourselves, marveled at the space artists’ depictions of them, maybe even recreated them on our own computers. Can you imagine the effect such images would have on an audience when they’re shown forty feet high?

Mars - The Movie would work on many different levels and in many different ways. Politicians could see where the money would really go. Students would be inspired to work towards science and engineering careers that might be involved in building the craft and life support systems. The Big Brother generation would be provided with their fix of human drama - and without even realising it would have their eyes opened to the harsh and challenging realities of life on Mars too.

But the most important reason of all for doing it is also the simplest one. Sat there in the dark, staring up at a silver screen five storeys high, for the first time ever, everyone, young and old, would see Mars as it deserves to be seen.

As it Is.

Filed under: Articles on August 7th, 2003