John Carpenter’s last movie to date, Ghosts of Mars, not particularly appreciated at the time of its release, was actually something of a comeback after the wayward In the Mouth of Madness, the chaotic and unfocused Village of the Damned, and the overt self-satire of Vampires. Ghosts returned to the template of Assault on Precinct 13, with a few dashes of The Thing and Escape from New York, and superficially polished production that seems to stretch a low budget a long way. The result looked out of date when released, a clunky attempt to play the modern action flick game without the money or edge to match.
The modesty of Ghosts as a production and a story is, however, one of the endearing things about it; it’s as finely crafted in pace, visual exposition, and deadpan sense of humour, as many a Carpenter classic. Even if, like most of Carpenter’s less committed, more cynical post-They Live work, it’s self-consciously tongue-in-cheek, where the distinguishing feature of his early work was the committed intensity with which they balanced their black humour, one can see now it was a short jump from this sort of back-to-basics affair to the likes of Neil Marshall’s funny/sick oeuvre, Joss Whedon’s Firefly and Serenity concept, and Danny Boyle’s more abstract, hyped-up approach to Carpenter-esque ideas.
Ghosts of Mars takes place in a future terraforming human colony on the red planet which reconstitutes the gritty flavour of the Wild West. And who are the Indians? Archaeologist Whitlock (Joanna Cassidy) accidentally provides them by unleashing long-buried disembodied aliens who possess human bodies and pervert them to their own savage liking and then set about exterminating the rest of the non-possessed populace. A unit of paramilitary security guards, led by Helena Braddock (Pam Grier), is dispatched to pick up a notorious prisoner, Desolation Williams (Ice Cube), from a remote mining camp, but instead find themselves besieged by these self-mutilating, turf-defending natives.
Ghosts contrasts, with increasing favour to itself, the movies that followed it in the decade from Hollywood , from Michael Bay Rio Bravo was Hawks’ riposte to High Noon, Ghosts is Carpenter’s send-up of Aliens.
Carpenter envisions a Martian colonial society that’s toying with social engineering, officially matriarchal. Not only are tough women common in this future, they’re prevalent, and, indeed, this presents its own amusing problems, like near-compulsory lesbianism amongst the female members of the security forces: heroine Melanie Ballard (Natasha Henstridge) antagonises boss Braddock by refusing to sleep with her to gain promotion. Simultaneously, the unleashed, insidious force of the aliens, although beaten off at first with satisfying brutality by the humans, proves eventually incomprehensible, and finally impossible to contain or repress. The story unfolds through layered, deceptively intricate, and yet never confused, anecdotal flashbacks. Melanie is telling her story, and that of others, in reporting her experiences to her hostile commanders, ready to be dismissed or pilloried, bringing attention to the way truth is mediated through individual eyes and decided upon by bureaucratic elision.
Where in Escape from LA Carpenter evoked the corrupted worship of illusory leftist heroes as well as the bullying self-righteousness of neo-cons, squeezing between them a disgusting caricatured edition of the Hollywood dream factory, and In the Mouth of Madness satirised the brain-deadening potential of the modern media, Ghosts presents two iconic figures of post-‘60s social protest: the tough feminist and the black survivor. Here they’re presented in contrast and conflict, but also working to create a new harmony, following Howard Hawks’ set template of resolving social tensions and problems in the context of common enemies. Carpenter quotes with keen humour the codes of blaxploitation films in an impious new context when Desolation accuses Melanie of having “The Woman” on her side, whilst Desolation and his comrades Uno, Dos, and Tres are social outcasts persecuted by the police who might as well be followed about by a funky Curtis Mayfield beat. In many ways, then, Carpenter makes a more pointed and aware use of Grier and the tropes of blaxploitation than Tarantino did in Jackie Brown.
Such are the oddball ways Carpenter takes on his recurring fascinations, and anxieties, with strong women, revolution and civic anarchy, the repression of individualism, and blurring social and ethnic boundaries, constantly evoked in the body-infecting spirits, demons, and aliens that recur in his works. Where Precinct 13 offered a black policeman, a tough Hawksian heroine, and a likeable outlaw as its heroes, Ghosts shuffles the figures into a diptych finally united by fighting spirit and maverick spunk.
Amusingly the only significant white male in the film, Jason Statham’s cocky, libidinous cockney Jericho, is all dick and little brains, who spends the whole film talking up his prowess with Melanie, leading to a great punchline where, when he points out to her what might be their last chance to get laid, she realises he has a point with a brief moment of reflection, and jumps right on him. That’s a fitting follow-up to an earlier moment, when she gives hulking, self-important tough guy Uno (Duane Davis) a lesson in R-E-S-P-E-C-T. But Melanie’s also coping with her conformist life by taking drugs, a bad habit which helps her in fighting off possession by the evil spirits, and it’s clear that she’s a stifled individualist with no place in the ass- (or pussy-) licking system she serves, inimical to both that system and also into being subsumed into the alien scheme. Such details make Melanie a genuinely interesting and likeable action heroine. Henstridge, all proportions maintained, is actually charismatic and physically graceful in the well-tailored role, and her high hard cheekbones can do most of her necessary acting.
Where Carpenter’s early films brought artistry to schlock that made them transcend that status and become pop art, his later films, even his best ones, revel in their own goofiness. And yet throughout his ramshackle ‘90s output, whether destroying the neat limits of cinema itself in In the Mouth of Madness or conjuring a greenie apocalypse in Escape from LA, it seems that Carpenter’s politicisation of narrative, with his patent refusal to clean up his open-ended messes and revelling instead in the notion of apocalypse, confirmed an increasing contempt for the hegemony of both the blockbuster format and many aspects of modern life. The funny finish of Ghosts of Mars, with black guy and blonde chick declaring that kicking ass is what they do best and marching out to take on the world come what may, is still discernibly ambiguous whilst reveling in revolutionary spunk and catastrophic epiphanies.
Ghosts is certainly uneven: the script is underwritten, and although the action scenes are generally excellent, the first big fight sports clumsily choreographed extras simply running circles in the background, and the limited budget obvious in places. Casting is frustrating: having Grier in his film ought to have provoked more imagination from Carpenter than to have her casually killed as a cap to the first act, and he did equally little to draw out Statham’s fresh, still almost untapped potential. Ice Cube is no Kurt Russell (or even Austin Stoker), all image and no force, and the lack of a strong star presence in the role robs Carpenter’s gift for creating iconic badassery of necessary potency. The aliens, with their shamanistic appearance and fondness for perverting their humanoid bodies with piercings and mutilations, like stripping their fingers down to bony claws, had the potential to be blood-curling manifestations of wild, sadomasochistic irrationality, similar to what the under-rated Event Horizon offered in its outer-space-creepfest, or the granddaddy of such motifs, Barker’s Hellraiser, but they’re mostly just Fangoria-fit cannon fodder. Carpenter, who brought the body-horror genre mainstream with The Thing, never returned to it with any enthusiasm. But generally Carpenter’s commitment to sustaining his film is stronger here than it had felt in over a decade. Ghosts of Mars moves as sleekly as any film of the ‘00s, the rugged, paranoid atmosphere is well-sustained, and most of all, it possesses intelligence without a shred of pretension.