Director: John Carpenter
Cast: Ice Cube, Natasha Henstridge, Jason Statham, Pam Grier
Have I Seen It Before: Never. Three years ago, I was of a mind to watch all of Carpenter’s library* through the summer between my final years of grad school, but time slipped away before I got to this one.
Seems like a long time ago.
Did I Like It: I kinda-sorta wished I had watched this one that summer and let Vampires (1998) go by the wayside. That earlier of Carpenter’s final big-studio releases felt like a mean-spirited swing at the dirt (complete with a star turn from the positively rancid James Woods), and this feels like something of a return to form.
It’s a b-movie at its core, with a budget that can’t quite acquit itself, and a cast that generally seems stiffer than they have proven to be in other films. There’s also the slight problem of this—despite being something of a space opera—being nothing new for Carpenter. One might have been able to call it Escape from the Red Planet (although you probably would have needed Kurt Russell in the Ice Cube role) or even Assault on Planet 4. It’s a western at its core, as most of Carpenter’s films are, and there’s just a flash of hope that he might have been rebounding more fully, and the 2000s could have been his best decade yet. It didn’t come to pass, obviously, and he sat the decade out, largely cashing obligatory checks from remake productions of his earlier, more celebrated films.
That sounds less like a criticism of this movie, and more of the man himself, but I don’t mean it to be. He may have, indeed, had more films left in him, but he may not have felt the need to fight with a Hollywood that was less and less interested in letting him do what he does best. That’s a completely legitimate decision, one I think I even applaud. If I had to face the indignities of spending most of 1992 making a Chevy Chase vanity project I may, too, have thought getting high and playing video games for the last few decades I have left.
*Minus the stuff he did for TV. Honestly, that Elvis biopic he did couldn’t be as good as Halloween (1978), or Assault on Precinct 13 (1976), right?