Cast: Liev Schreiber, Elias Koteas, Romola Garai, Olivia
Williams, and Goran Kostic
Director: Ruairi Robinson
94 minutes (15) 2013
Widescreen ratio 2.35:1
Universal DVD Region 2
Rating: 4/10
Review by Andrew Darlington
On Mars “a shrunken sun sank below the horizon and
darkness came. Stars gleamed hard and bright through the tenuous atmosphere. A
meteor dug a small crater under the palest of moonlight.” In his introduction
to New Writings In SF #13 (1968),
John Carnell comments, “once, many years ago, the author Sydney J. Bounds
worked in the engineering department of London’s Underground system but gave it
up for the more precarious life of a full-time writer.” By the time I met
Bounds in his book-crammed Kingston-upon-Thames
Archivist Roy Kettle points out that “Bounds didn’t
write many novels – just five, but he wrote 100+ short stories which almost
invariably appeared only in British SF magazines and original anthologies.
However, rather out of the blue, one of his stories, The Animators, was picked up and made into The Last Days On Mars in 2013 (a few years after his death). I
rather think it was because the screenwriter, Clive Dawson, spotted it in the
anthology where it first appeared because he had the book for the reprint of
Arthur Porges’ The Ruum which,
apparently, he’d hoped that Hammer Films would make with his screenplay.”
The anthology – Tales
Of Terror From Outer Space (1975) was a Fontana
The
Animators comes around midpoint, previously unpublished, but
later picked up and reprinted in Creepies,
Creepies, Creepies edited by Helen Hoke (Franklin Watts, 1977). And Ruairi
Robinson’s movie shows the advantage of taking an 11-page short story and
expanding it, rather than attempting to compress a full novel down to
movie-length. There are some minor switches in the interests of racial
diversity and visual appeal, a couple of gender reassignments to Bounds’
originally white all-male personnel, but the plot development holds together
remarkably well during its transfer to the big screen. The deserts of Jordan
“Sidney J. Bounds has had much experience in dealing
with assorted horrors, as his many anthologised stories will testify, and he
handles The Animators with his usual
skill,” comments Chetwynd-Hayes. “The scene is set on the ill-fated planet
Mars, but the end results are hell-bent for Earth.” And there are some obvious
reference points, John Carpenter’s Ghosts
Of Mars (2001), where the dead spirits of an extinct Martian civilisation
are unleashed to possess the bodies of the miners responsible for disturbing
their tomb. And the David Tennant Doctor
Who episode The Waters Of Mars
(2009), in which a water-borne virus infects and corrupts the human colonists
of the bio-dome, which must be destroyed before the ‘Flood’ contagion can reach
Earth. Although it’s worth bearing in mind that Bounds story precedes them
both, and teases around the rim of speculation. Nothing as outré as extinct
Martian cities, merely the possibility of long-dormant microbiological
organisms suspended deep beneath the regolith for the millions of years since
the warmer wetter Mars that NASA Rover-probes indicate.
The jaunty tones of Jack Hylton’s Blue Skies Are Around The Corner (1938)
deliberately contrasts the gathering storm-front beneath authentically dour
Martian skies, dust-waves of “the first big one of the season” approaching to engulf
Tantalus Base One in which the eight-strong crew have been sitting out their
six-month stay... with the 19 remaining hours ticking away before they’re
lifted off to the orbiting ‘Aurora’ for “six-months home in a floating coffin.”
Until the darkness closes in, Mars swallowing up the puny human toe-hold on the
world, leaving only the airlock lens illuminated to resemble a single prescient
eye.
Meanwhile, in a last-minute ruse before nightfall,
Marko Petrovic (Bosnian-Serb actor Goran Kostic) returns to investigate the
test-site of an earlier bore-sample that seems to indicate the presence of
ancient microscopic bacterial life. Intent on keeping the discovery for himself
he uses the pretext of fixing a broken sensor. Richard Harrington watches him from
the clunky Mars Bug, until he’s shocked to see a sinkhole opening up to swallow
the geologist. Using the second Bug, an already irritably fraying Captain
Charles Brunel (Elias Koteas), is “barely holding it together” as he and Lauren
Dalby (Yusra Warsama) prepare to undertake a rescue. Dalby disobeys protocol
and climbs down the pit. She also disappears. Both of them are dead, but not
for long. Soon, there are two sets of footprints leading away from the pit.
Liev Schreiber, who plays Vincent Campbell, has a
heavyweight CV that includes the Scream
horror trilogy. Welsh-born writer-actor Tom Cullen – who plays Harrington, also
has presence and some impressive movie credits, including an episode (The Entire History Of You) of TV’s Black Mirror and – for those who like
that sort of thing, the faux class-nostalgia of Downton Abbey. Olivia Williams – who plays vexed
confrontationally-barbed colleague Kim Aldrich, worked with Roman Polanski on The Ghost Writer (2010). They are part
of a strong cast. The eerie rasp of over-exerted breathing inside helmets is
effective, as is the claustrophobic hallucinatory descent into the sinkhole’s
soft-focus darkness.
In Bounds’ story it is Shorty Pugh’s body that
Harrington retrieved from the pit, and buries in a shallow grave. Exposure to
the bacteria reanimates the corpse. “Then, slowly, it set out across the flat
and desolate land with plodding steps. A naked dead thing that moved across the
night-dark dust, moved steadily on a direct course for the distant Base.” In
the movie the shattered helmet results in the same condition, unsuited zombies
Marko and Dalby cross the rift valley back towards base with driller-killer
instinct. But, although there’s a fair amount of furious action-hazard, the
space helmets and chaotic red-light alert-strobing sometimes limits
expressiveness and make it difficult to tell who’s doing what to whom, or why.
And there’s no clear confrontation with the reanimated dead, just hints and
glimpses of charred and rotting features obfuscated behind shattered
face-visors. Where more clarity would help punch out the story there’s no
gratuitous shock-horror, no Walking Dead
or Z Nation moments. No George A.
Romero zombies.
Brunel is wounded – Kim’s microscope betrays the
bacterial cell-division infection in his bloodstream, his face tracked with
shadow-lines of contagion, before he turns violent, and dies. Taking the
precaution of strapping his body down, they inject an antidote, he twitches
against his restraints, but the retroviral effect is temporary. The survivors
retreat from the resulting mayhem to the hydroponics dome, using a conduit to
return through blood-trails and wreckage to transmit a sky-link Mayday
distress-call to the orbital ISC Mission Control, only to be pursued back by
the zombie Marko. “I was planning on taking a lot of unnecessary risks,” quips Campbell
Eventually only three remain – Vincent Campbell,
Rebecca Lane (male expedition metallurgist in Bounds’ tale, now played by
Romola Garai), and panicky mission psychologist Robert Irwin (British actor
Johnny Harris of The Imaginarium Of
Doctor Parnassus, 2009) escaping across the Mars night in a solar-powered
Bug with battery-power dropping, intent on reaching the lift-off point, with
that hanging Cold Equation that she’s
infected. “It’s too late for her,” protests Irwin. Should they leave her? Campbell Campbell
A significant difference here is that in the short
story Brunel is the last die, and “later, no longer human, he joined the living
dead aboard the ship. It rose into the purple sky on a column of flame and on
course for Earth.” The movie is a little more nuanced. Campbell Campbell
No blue skies around the corner. As an adaptation
of Bounds’ story, it would have been nice if the film could have been a tad
better. But would Syd have approved? Chances are he would. He’d certainly have
enjoyed becoming part of the Universal Studios continuity back to Boris Karloff
and Bela Lugosi. And at least it would have enabled him to buy a newer
typewriter.
