ven if you're not the sort to have NASA's homepage bookmarked as your own, chances are you recall the euphoria surrounding 2004's successful landing of the Mars rovers—appropriately named Spirit and Opportunity. The new IMAX film Roving Mars does a good job at recapturing some of that euphoria, as seen through the eyes of those who created the rovers. Unfortunately, this film doesn't do as good a job at documenting the experience, or conveying the wonder that is Mars.
The Red Planet's mysteries are an ever-engaging subject, and the thought that we now have conclusive evidence that probes into those mysteries is alluring. Roving Mars attempts to address the whole gamut of experiences by traversing a wide range of territory in its tight, 40-minute presentation.
The film starts out with the development of the robotic wonders in a clean room and moves through the troubles the team experienced with parachute technology; the launch; the tension-filled, moment-of-truth landing on Mars; and the results of some of the early research the rovers—essentially high-tech, roving geologists, as one NASA official described them—supplied in the early days of their mission.
The movie is based on a book by NASA's Steve Squyres, who also provides some of the hyper-enthusiastic narration (the rest of the narration tends towards the melodramatic, as does the score). Sadly, the script could have used some assistance: A big deal is made early on about how the initial parachute designs failed, but the film lacks follow-up on how, exactly, NASA solved this problem. Like the interviews, the footage—including that from the actual launch and landing—lacks a timestamp to provide context as to when these events occurred. And Spirit's early mechanical difficulties are glossed over entirely, even though that was a real-life dramatic moment at that time.
CGI unfortunately confuses
Context and perspective are, unfortunately, a huge part of what is missing from Roving Mars. For the most part, the footage is there, but as a viewer, you're left with more questions than you should be with a documentary, and even more questions if this film is truly intended to straddle the worlds of entertainment hype and docudrama. Even as a public relations showpiece—ostensibly made by Lockheed Martin as a "public service announcement" (as it says in the opening credits), the film stumbles—Lockheed's role is never quite clear, though one might extrapolate that Lockheed was involved in the building of the rovers.
A particularly troublesome aspect of the missing perspective is the role animations and CG play in the film. As moviegoers, we are conditioned to expect lifelike visual effects. Not surprisingly, Roving Mars has the same caliber of visual effects you'd expect from a Hollywood blockbuster produced by Frank Marshall. The primary difficulty with this lies in trying to figure out when this docudrama's footage is real—and when it isn't. The animations involving the Rovers' landing and operation are clearly that, animations. However, the spacescapes and landscapes are so realistic that only when a smaller-scale mission photograph is superimposed on top of the landscape, for example, do you question the veracity of the 10-foot-tall image you were just looking at.
The animations, of course, can't hold a candle to the real footage—when you can tell it's the real thing. The footage of the liftoff for Spirit's craft is downright spectacular, the next best thing to actually being at Kennedy Space Center yourself. And the story behind the rovers, and their initial findings about the Red Planet, is engrossing, even if Roving Mars' presentation is a bit flawed.
The prospect of seeing some of the mission images up close in all their IMAX-screen glory is, to me, part of the appeal of seeing this film, and I was disappointed by the movie's wasting this opportunity to clearly deliver this. Not to mention disappointed by the movie's gaps in recounting the events associated with the rovers, which, incidentally, are still roving merrily along on Mars.
