Get your Cube to Mars

My first thing, right out of the gates, is the casting. I loved it on two fronts. First, there's some of the principle players. Natasha Henstridge really was in her heyday in the 90's and it was good to see that spill over into the early 2000's. She bridged that gap well. She had that status as being incredibly attractive while being extremely tough. It's a difficult tightrope to traverse but she has typically done so in multiple films and she's brought some serious power to that dynamic. Second, Ice Cube. I mean what do you say about this guy. He's done it all now. I think he's even coming back around to some of those tougher roles in recent years despite his softening exterior through some of the 2010's. I don't know that you ever sand down Cube all the way but he is able to perform similarly to Henstridge in that capacity that he can be the action star and still play the recipient of adolescent antics in the "Are we..." movies. Finally, I have to throw my boy Jason Statham in there. This was on the early part of his career. He was getting out there. It's the same time frame as Snatch so I knew he had so much potential, but he was desperately trying to break in the Hollywood scene so his selection process was anything but selective. If there was an offer, he was in it. I do think this is some of the most hair I've ever seen him with, however.

The second piece of this movie that took me back to the year I graduated high school was the music. There was that perfect action rock music that time stamps movies like this with a sort of unmatched precision. At a time when Limp Bizkit, Korn, and many other bands that weren't big on spelling accuracy permeated the radio waves, this movie took straight from that playbook. Almost any time a weapon was prepared to fire I could practically hear Disturbed doing a sound check. But it was one of the best things about the movie. The music isn't particularly good or noteworthy in history for much of anything. But it takes me back to a point in time when it wasn't necessarily supposed to do that. It was there to punctuate the action with a killer melodic mayhem via the thrashing of guitars. There have always been bands that are hard and loud but that early 2000's style was something unto it's own in my book. It was kind of the last time frame that rock music really felt like it was doing what it was supposed to do. And I say that as someone who has total musical blindness. I know the music I know and that's it. You could play me a song from any of the bands I've already named and there's a better than average chance that unless Fred Durst's iconic sound is front and center, I'd have no idea which band you were playing me. But I'll bet you money I could tell you if the music is from the early 2000's. And that's a fact. Probably.

My final positive note on this movie is it was just a lot more fun than Mirrors. It didn't feel like it took itself too seriously. It wasn't that it folded under pressure and knew it wasn't a really well made movie, because it supported itself under it's own weight. But it felt like it really was supposed to just be a kind of fun we were having in 2001. It made just enough sense that you might not really question it. It told us it was in the future and then made everything look like it was from 1996. They didn't even really rely on space age kinds of weapons. Hundreds of years in the future, we're just out here going through bullets. We've colonized Mars to a majority state but we're still running around with machine guns and grenades. It's like everybody showed up to set and they were told it was a space movie in the future where they had to fight a sort of Martian zombie-like people in a crappy little mining town. I'd be suspicious if the script wasn't more than cleverly placed post it notes on the scenery. It wasn't great, but it looked like most everyone had a good time with it. And that energy translated.

Now for the bad. This isn't a good movie. I enjoyed myself enough. But it's not a good movie. I never saw Carpenter's other movie in the 2000's, The Ward, but I think by the late 90's he was beginning to run out of steam in remaining culturally relevant as a director. I don't fault him for it. He'd been handing us incredible movies for decades at that point. He had done so many wonderful things that I don't even hold this movie against him at all. It was fun. I enjoyed myself just enough to make it through the movie. But it was apparent very early on that this was not going to be a great movie. I think what made it better than Mirrors was it still worked relatively well within the structure it set up. Carpenter still got good performances out of the people he was directing. Ice Cube gave us exactly what we'd expect out of his portrayal of a criminal turned ally in the heat of a conflict. Henstridge delivered on everything you'd want her to. She was hard nosed, intense, and beautiful. Even Statham hit the mark in the ways I would have expected in 2001. And the rest of the supporting cast was there in a way that pushed everything along. The plot was thin but he handed it to us earnestly. I appreciated that. So overall, it just wasn't good, but it was the okayest amount of fun I could have with it and that satisfied me.

The other identifier of a movie I think I've applied in 2026, which may or may not be fair, is how well does it grab and retain your attention. In the world we live in today, we have any number of screens competing for our eyeballs and despite a film from 2001 not being able to anticipate that, I do still employ it as a metric for how well a movie does. I've watched plenty of films so far this year that I've wavered here and there on total eyes on screen time. I do try to keep my phone locked at the start of a movie but I can't help but be drawn to the distraction if a film trudges along in a way that doesn't keep me engaged. So while I maintain that by the end I was appreciative of the product that was delivered, there were still times that the film really failed to keep me glued to the screen. And that's not the only indicator of a good or a bad movie. But I will note that the lack of engagement is something I do feel is worthy of addressing as a shortcoming of any film. There are movies from far earlier than this film with much less glitz and glamour of Hollywood that have held my attention regardless. I can watch Harvey for the ten millionth time and I never even think of picking up my phone for a movie I still love after so many viewings. If I'm going to critique this movie, I'm going to submit that as a fail. It's a measured fail, but I do want to make sure I'm public about it.

At the end of the day, this move felt like a C+ to me. It was definitely in that same category as Mirrors from yesterday but where that one felt like so much more of a failure, despite the shortcomings I noted, this film was at least more fun. The action sequences made it more lively. The characters felt more three dimensional and important, even if their roles were relegated to their type-casted strengths and archetypes. Everything worked better. It's definitively a C tier movie. But it doesn't just stay in that middle of the pack kind of film. There's enough fun to compensate for the negatives and that earns it that + in the end for me. It doesn't make the shelf, obviously. And I own almost all of Jason Statham's movies, even if they aren't great. But this one is a single serve kind of flick for me. I watched it. It happened. I'm moving on. And I don't think there's anything wrong with it. Carpenter may not have hit it out of the park with this one, like many of his predecessors. But he still got a solid base hit with what he delivered. And I think as evidenced by his fading in the early 2000's out of the director's chair but not out of relevance, he seems to have realized that he's still quite capable outside of that captain's role. I applaud him for that.

I apologize in advance but as close as we are to the end of the month, this is going to be a common theme here in the closing. We've only got four more movies. I wish I knew what they were going to be but that's the fun of it all. I won't know until I decide it's time to pick out a movie tomorrow and we'll follow the trail right up to the point where I click play and begin the journey. I'd love to squeeze in one or two more A/B level movies and I think that's possible. I may have to be a bit more intentional in my endeavor and perhaps that will be a part of the selection process for at least one of the picks. But as for the movie for the 28th, I have no idea what it will be at this point. We'll simply have to wait and see what comes next. Until then, though, I'll catch you on the flip side.