Getting closer

We’ve gone past monstrous Martians. Our films now have sets inspired by actual video and images from space missions. There’s input from space agencies. Linguists consult on alien grammar.

For everything else, there are fancy effects.

But in the heady 1990s, a garish, futuristic Mars felt fitting. Total

Recall (1990), based on a story by sci-fi author Philip K Dick (We Can Remember It For You Wholesale), had Arnold Schwarzenegger play a worker who can’t tell if the espionage he’s embroiled in is real or a memory implant.

The world got weirder in

1996’s Mars Attacks! which parodied the sci-fi pulp stereotypes of the ’60s. These aliens had exposed brains, ghoulish faces, and weren’t shy about firing those deadly green rayguns.

The new century began with a flop. Red Planet (2000) was set 56 years in the future, where something’s interfering with our oxygen-generating systems on Mars. A crew investigating the rusty, dusty landscape, finds that perhaps it’s not aliens we should be worried about. In 2012, John Carter leaped on to the big screen almost a century after Edgar Rice Burroughs dreamed him up. It was no match for the 21st century. NASA’S Curiosity rover had already landed on Mars and had its own Twitter account. On TV, The Expanse (2015-2020) has adapted James S A Corey’s novel series of the same name to great acclaim. It’s set in a brightly lit future where we have colonised Mars and the rest of the solar system. But a political conspiracy threatens to shatter a fragile peace. Meanwhile the 2015 film The Martian (based on novel of the same name by Andy Weir) makes it frightfully, nail-bitingly clear how inhospitable Mars can be if you’re stranded alone, growing potatoes for food.

Rations remain our preoccupations today. Stowaway, which was released last month, is set on a Mars-bound craft that takes off with a mechanical engineer trapped in a vent. Will he threaten the mission? And is there enough oxygen to go around? Forget gory Martians, the closer we get to Mars, the more it seems that humans are the problem.