A private detective and her android partner track down a notorious hacker in the dark underbelly of a Martian metropolis in this superb cyber-punk-noir animated feature, packed with humour and action.
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[Mars Express] is remarkably ambitious and as a sci-fi geek, I was in awe the entire film trying to pick up on and analyze every component.
Screened as part of NZIFF 2023
Mars Express 2023
At this year’s Cannes, the big discovery was this five-years-in-the-making, cyber-punk-noir animated feature from French director Jérémie Périn. This hard sci-fi creation of a colonised Mars shares genetic make-up in tandem with Métal Hurlant Magazine, Ghost in the Shell, I, Robot, Robocop and Blade Runner in a dystopian tale of a rogue code allowing androids to be jailbroken from their inbuilt (non-violent) hardline directives. The two P.Is thrown into this matrix-miasma are Aline—a human—and Carlos who is a ”backup”; an android replica of Aline’s deceased partner.
Both investigators go down a galactic rabbit hole in search of answers that start with a runaway cybernetics student who has discovered some strange coding while programming a robot. An ambitious space spectacle, Mars Express features complex world-building (with input from futurists, scientists and engineers) and attention to numerous clever details that will immediately immerse viewers and provide a rich hunting ground for repeat viewings. Noctis, the Martian capital, is a visual wonder of mecha-architecture and is the perfect environment for a clever script that intertwines a noir-ish robotic utopia alongside a tangled web of corrupt players at the highest echelon of Martian power. — Ant Timpson