t the turn of the new millenium, America's thriving space program, led by Col. John Wilder (Hudson) initiates a series of manned missions to Mars, in the hopes that colonization might take some of the pressure off an Earth threatened by war.
Unfortunately, Mars is home to an ancient race that fears and distrust the invaders from Earth. The first two missions end in the deaths of the astronauts. In the first incident, a Martian husband is driven into a jealous rage by his wife's telepathic infatuation with an approaching human astronaut. In the second incident, a community of Martians uses telepathic trickery to fool the human expedition into believing they've found an afterlife populated by various beloved figures from the past.
These attempts at repelling the Earth invader are doomed to failure. During the third expedition he leads along with colleagues Sam Parkhill (McGavin) and Jeff Spender (Casey), Wilder discovers that the Martians have all just died due to a planetwide epidemic of chicken pox, brought to Mars by the prior failed expeditions. Spender, horrified by the cavalier reaction some of his colleagues have to this tragedy, and to the sanctity of Mars as a whole, goes rogue and vows to drive his fellow Earthmen from the planet.
The colonization proceeds, complicated by scattered indications that there might be some remaining Martians after all. Two evangelist friars (Fritz Weaver and Roddy McDowall) on a mission of faith encounter disembodied entities in the mountains. Two aging colonists (Schell and Wolfgang Reichmann) take in the lonely shapechanging Martian who has taken the form of their deceased son, David (Michael Anderson Jr.).
When the colonists abandon Mars to face a nuclear threat on Earth, the equally lonely Ben Driscoll (Christopher Connelly) finds himself left behind to face a highly unsatisfactory first date with Genevieve Selsor, the apparent last woman on Mars (Bernadette Peters). Another castaway, Peter Hatheway (Barry Morse), who lives in the desert with his strangely sunny wife and child, works day and night to signal a rescue ship.
It all concludes with Wilder returning from a devastated Earth to make his final peace with the past and introduce his family to the true face of the Martians.
A classic crashes and burns
Fans like to pontificate that they know where Hollywood goes wrong, producing filmed science
fiction. The secret, they say, lies in finding and respecting worthwhile source material. Find a classic work of science fiction by a master of the field, hire a master of similar stature to script it, film it with reverence and intelligence and a deep understanding of the original, hire a talented cast, and you should produce works as immortal as the original classics.
It should be that simple, right?
Alas, this is exactly the sequence of events that produced the miniseries adaptation of The Martian Chronicles, and the results were creaky, overextended and effective only in fits.
The problem is more than the primitive sets, and even more primitive special effects, that seem downright embarrassing to modern eyes. It's more than the uneven performances, which range from the uneven (Hudson's) to the bored (McDowall's) to the quite good, with the late-career performance by the one-time international star Maria Schell a particular highlight. The problem's even deeper than the mixed tone and stop-and-go pacing that goes along with many an anthology film—even one like The Martian Chronicles, which attempts to weave Bradbury's short stories into some semblance of a cohesive narrative. After all, a production more than four hours long (after the removal of commercials) should have plenty of room for funny episodes and tragic episodes and lyrical episodes, and The Martian Chronicles has sequences that work quite well in all three categories.
The problem, really, is that much of the miniseries is flabbily dramatized. There are redundant scenes, long sequences spent discussing points that could have been nailed in a couple of lines, further explanations of plot developments the audience got the first time, and scene after scene staged in a manner that robs them of the majority of their dramatic impact. (A chase scene involving Martian desert boats emerges as particular failure.) The power and lyricism of Bradbury's original stories remains evident, but that's in large part despite the translation to television, not because of it.
Some high points remain. There's Bernie Casey's dignified performance as a man of conscience driven to violence by the injustice he perceives. Darren McGavin's skill at playing ridiculous men, which was so memorable in Kolchack and A Christmas Story, is put to good service during his character's unsuccessful career as a diner owner. Rock Hudson's performance of the lyrical final scenes seem to have moved him in a manner that some of the earlier sequences did not. Finally, there's what should have been the production's most dispensable sequence, the adaptation of a story tonally at odds with everything that takes places before and after it: a comic interplay between Christopher Connelly, playing the desperately lonely last man on Mars, and Bernadette Peters, playing the kind of woman who inspires panicked flight even when she seems to be the only remaining female on the planet.
The DVD extras are limited to chapter breaks and subtitles.
