Mars Express – techno-noir on Mars

The film noir genre has quite clear rules and unwritten laws, which are not recommended to be violated in whatever setting and/or time period the events of noir cinema take place. Whether it’s classic noir detectives of the 1940s and 1950s, neo-noir of the 1960s and 1970s, neo-noir of the 1980s, or sci-fi and cyberpunk techno-noir. The French animated film Mars Express, which has now been released in Ukraine, belongs to the latter subgenre.

Mars Express takes place in the year 2200, mostly on Mars, with an introduction on Earth and a few minor episodes in space. The Martian colony of Noctis is a world of corporations, cyberpunk, and… a very pleasant place to live. The colonists live under a huge dome, and the town beneath it is filled with modern houses, cozy dwellings, green parks, lakes, and wide highways. Its inhabitants have a rest, work on the technologies of the future, study at prestigious technological universities, etc. All the dirty work is done by robots, and the homeless and other losers live in the dungeons of the First Base, of course, living in the “High tech. Low life”.

The main character of the film is a private detective Aline Ruby. She and her partner Carlos Rivera, a robot copy of the woman’s real-life partner who was killed five years ago, return from Earth to Mars. The two of them have hunted down a female hacker on the mother planet who is engaged in the liberation of robots and has stolen important information from a corporation run by another friend of the detective. But upon arrival on Mars, it turns out that the warrant for the fugitive has been canceled, and Aline is advised to take on another case for now. She doesn’t hesitate to do so – it’s a search for a student girl who disappeared from campus four days ago with her roommate. As is usually the case in film noir, all these events are connected. And the Mars Express is a ship that serves the Earth-Mars line.

Let’s see how well Mars Express meets the requirements and code of the noir genre.

A harsh, taciturn detective who used to be a cop and/or served in the army, smokes a lot and occasionally tips a bottle or glass of whiskey? Є! And even if the tough detective here is a woman and she does not smoke in the frame, in accordance with the modern requirements of the film industry, it does not matter.

An intricate plot in which everyone is trying to frame the main characters, and at the end there is always an unexpected twist, after which one of the characters [“Spoilers, spoilers!” – as the wife of a famous Doctor used to say] and the other will go on a long, long journey? Yes!

Brutal and bloody murders in the spirit of cyberpunk, i.e. techno-noir, with severed limbs, severed heads and fountains of blood? Yes!

But with la femme fatale, it didn’t work out so well. Although it can be assumed that in Mars Express this image is divided between three women. The detective Aline Ruby herself is quite a femme fatale, at least she kills regularly and a lot. Plus, the female hacker that Aline and her partner catch is also, in a sense, la femme fatale. Plus, another character [“Spoilers, spoilers!”] who identifies as a woman is also very, very fatal. So, relatively speaking, there are also…

Although there is absolutely no sexual tension between the main characters in the film, it doesn’t feel noirish, despite the plethora of erotic content in the film. This includes sex bots of both sexes for every taste in the spirit of Detroit: Become Human (it’s coming soon), mind-melds that replace sex robots, and half-naked women and men that keep popping up in the frame. But the sexual tension that sometimes makes the air ring in classic noir is absent in Mars Express.

Also, there is no such important noir attribute as night and rain. There are few night scenes, and during the day, Noctis is flooded with streams of blue earthly light from the artificial sky-dome. On the other hand, sometimes the dome malfunctions and we get a replacement for the rain in the form of “The sky is the color of a TV set tuned to a dead channel.” Yes, just as the great Gibson would have it.

Actually, Mars Express has a lot of quotes and references to classic noir films and cyberpunk works. There’s a paraphrase of a scene from the first Total Recall with Arnold Schwarzenegger. And a little bit from Johnny Mnemonic with Keanu Reeves. And links to Cyberpunk 2077 and Cyberpunk: Edgerunners. What’s more, there’s even an organic version of Fuchikoma, the huge smart tank from the original anime Ghost in the Shell (1995).

Mars Express has a very nice “clean” graphic style and animation that combines 2D and unobtrusive 3D. Some landscapes of Mars, as well as scenes with ships in space, can be put on the wallpaper. Moreover, the design of androids, technology, and attention to the details of the world are pleasing.

There are even jokes about the lack of communication as a way to get around a boring directive, as well as the lack of free space when trying to update old android models. Mars Express also interestingly predicts the total asexuality of people towards each other, as well as the future of outsourcing galleys, where university students simply rent their brains by the hour.

Mars Express is a pleasure to watch. It’s a complete story of an hour and a half, but… it’s a very straightforward story that follows literally all the plot traces of the noir genre, so you can predict, if not the name of the criminal, then the ending of the film almost at the very beginning.

Plus, there are big problems with the development of the main character. All we know about detective Aline Ruby is that she served in the army, that she is asexual, drinks a lot, doesn’t like to give up on a case and lose people, and… that’s it. Yes, this is fully in line with the canons of the noir genre, but it’s not the 1940s. The same Carlos Rivera, the consciousness of a murdered man in the outdated body of an android, is even more alive than the main character. We see his loved ones, we understand what he feels.

The movie also lacks emotion, and even in the most intense moments it’s a bit bland. Especially in comparison with the recent Cyberpunk: Edgerunners.

Mars Express, on the other hand, is nice to watch, despite some flaws it’s a good cyberpunk cartoon. There is a lack of techno detectives, it’s not like you have to rewatch Blade Runner and Blade Runner 2049.

The budget of Mars Express was only €9 million, but the movie still failed at the box office, grossing only $1.5 million, because there was almost no advertising. On the other hand, this movie is designed for streaming services, so it’s not clear why it should be released in theaters. Nevertheless, if you have a chance to watch Mars Express on the big screen, do it.