Schedule your own journey on Jérémie Périn’s “Mars Express” anytime via the Shout! Studios/GKIDS Films home release.
Douglas Davidson
Mars Express, Jérémie Périn, Laurent Sarfati, Léa Drucker, Mathieu Amalric, Daniel Njo Lobé, Marie Bouvet, Sébastien Chassagne, Marthe Keller, Geneviève Doang, GKIDS Films, Shout! Studios, home release
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Elements of Madness
A vicious murder, a private detective, a thread-pull revealing a larger conspiracy, and a question of robotic sentience — all the makings of a cyberpunk neo-noir. We’ve seen it before with the Blade Runner and The Matrix series, as well as, to a different extent, films like RoboCop (1987), Ghost in the Shell (1995), Johnny Mnemonic (1995), and even the recent Restore Point (2023). These cyberpunk neo-noir, also known as tech noir, tales utilize a setting of such futuristic living that one may presume cutting-edge thinking, only to expose that humanity has not advanced itself as far as one might hope. The latest to tackle such concepts is co-writer/director Jérémie Périn’s (Lastman) Mars Express, coming available on physical and digital formats via Shout! Studios. With over an hour of bonus features, the home release of Mars Express is sure to enlighten any audience who decides to give the film a shot, but it will absolutely cement Périn as a delightful cinematic nerd.

In the future, there are two societies: those who live on Earth and those rich enough to afford to live on Mars. In this world, life is aided by a variety of robots which are relied upon for everything from entertainment, companionship, life extension, and law enforcement. While on a missing person’s case, private detective Aline Ruby (voiced by Léa Drucker) and her partner Carlos (voiced by Daniel Njo Lobé) discover that not everything in their peaceful existence on Mars is what it seems. A realization made worse when one confined threat reveals itself to be far more existential and critical.

If you’ve spent any time in the tech noir space, there’s a good deal about Mars Express that won’t surprise or upend you in any way. As developed by Laurent Sarfati (Lastman) and Périn, the skeleton of the film is close enough to tales presented before that one is going to feel (before they watch it) too strong a sense of familiarity to give it a go. This would be, in a word, wrong. The framework may be familiar, but the execution of it all is what matters. Running just shy of 90 minutes, Mars Express has no time to waste, creating setup, mystery, and solution over and over until the audience isn’t quite sure which side they’re on anymore — an impressive feat, to be sure. Whether it’s the cybernetic partner who is not a love interest for Aline, rather he’s as fully-formed and complex as she with a trajectory all his own; or it’s the camerawork in the opening suggesting various perspectives and yet, each time we think we have it locked, the camera disobeys the rules it sets forth; or it’s the character and world designs that structure all the humans as natively different from everything else by animating them in 2D with everything else in 3D; Périn utilizes a mixture of techniques in order to subconsciously manipulate the audience into being on-guard. Just as the film’s mystery is multiple layers, so is the execution of Mars Express, creating a sense that the awe and wonder are intentional to distract us, like a smokescreen, from the clear dissonance in every frame. Credit to the screenwriters for constructing a narrative that feels familiar while bucking convention to the point that a second watch is almost necessary in order to fully process what the pair created within the well-worn subgenre.

At first glance, the fact that there’re only three on-disc features may seem like a missed opportunity to dig into Mars Express, an issue many home releases of late are guilty of. What Shout! Studios offers in conjunction with GKIDS Films, however, is proof that looks can be deceiving. The first featurette, “Let’s Play Classic Games with Director Jérémie Périn,” is a 36-minute sit-down interview between GKIDS’s Social Media Manager Thomas Biery and Périn wherein they discuss everything from the cinematic and video game influences on the making of the film, some of Périn’s favorite robotic villains (this is a triumph!), his top five gaming consoles, and a veritable mish-mash of everything directly relevant to the making of Mars Express or to Périn specifically. The amusing thing about this being that the conversation takes place while Périn and Biery play games via emulator. The other two featurettes average 15 minutes as Périn walks audiences through the construction, design process, and various elements of two scenes in the film: the opening scene and the car chase sequence known as “Sequence 78.” Shout! Studios and GKIDS have provided materials like this before in releases like BELLE (2021) and the Masaaki Yuasa five-film collection they released last December 2023, and they are wonderful whether you’re interested in animation, film design, or just generally learning more about the thought process for how a scene is developed. In this case, you’ll learn about the pain-staking process of utilizing the visual language that defines human as 2D hand-drawn animated figures and robots, scenery, and others as 3D in order to create the sensation of separation between humans and everything else in the film, and the difficulty created in the opening sequence between the character of Dominique (voiced by Angéline Henneguelle) and the cat by doing so. A particular interesting tidbit is learning that Périn drew inspiration for a specific POV shot execution from a Twitch conversation he stumbled upon, as he explains while discussing the ways in which POV is established in the opening and is frequently disrupted, thereby creating a sense of distrust between audience and narrative action. In the second breakdown, “Sequence 78,” Périn points out a very specific and easily missed easter egg, reference points to both Psycho (1960) and Demolition Man (1993), as well as a specific choice that bothers him as a disruption to the naturalistic execution of the film despite him seeing it as a narrative necessity for the audience.

Additional features include an original French-language and English-dub option, both in TrueHD 5.1, and alternative subtitling (original theatrical, English for the hard of hearing and deaf, Spanish).

In terms of the on-disc presentation, while there’s certainly a desire for 4K UHD with HDR and Dolby Atmos soundtracks, what we receive in a 1080p HD format certainly does the job impressively. The film isn’t exactly Blade Runner 2049 (2017) in terms of visual spectacle, but there’s no denying the impressiveness of the visual approach. On the whole, the film leans more into the traditional rather than extraordinary, helping to convey the ordinariness of living on Mars amid sentient technology of various types. There’s beauty in the ordinary, so whether we’re watching Aline and Carlos navigate a Fifth Element-esque (1997) over-populated Earth or investigating various places on Mars, there’s a simplicity in the designs that captivate in the way that they are just left of expected. Likewise, the score from Fred Avril (Sparrow) and Philippe Monthaye helps maintain the awe of interplanetary travel, the mystery that courses through the film, and the melancholy that fellows the main characters throughout, with a delicacy that matches the moment while giving the entire film an orchestral throughline. In concert, the visual and auditory elements immerse the audience in this world which begs those who explore it to consider their role in the technical conflicts to come.

A film like Mars Express impresses because of the way it builds upon expectations. It explores mature ideas of identity within systems of control (applied to both humans and sentient systems) without bending toward baser elements. It starts simply and ends cosmically, diametrically opposed in concept until one experiences the journey. Only then can the audience truly understand the connection between philosophy and execution. It functions as both insular mystery thriller and provocative investigation of humanity. Mars Express may not dazzle upon initial launch, but it will find a way to linger within your mind enough that scheduling a revisit is all but assured.

Mars Express Blu-ray Special Features:

Audio: English Dolby True HD 5.1 Surround, French Dolby True HD 5.1 Surround

Let’s Play Classic Games with Director Jérémie Périn (36:45)

Director Scene Breakdown – Opening Scene (13:37)

Director Scene Breakdown – Sequence 78 (16:18)

Available on Blu-ray and VOD June 18th, 2024.

For more information, head to the official GKIDS Films Mars Express webpage.

To purchase, head to the official Shout! Studios Mars Express webpage.

Final Score: 3.5 out of 5.