Crew
Director – Jeremie Perin, Screenplay – Jeremie Perin & Laurent Sarfati, Producers – Gaelle Bayssiere & Didier Creste, Music – Fred Avril & Philippe Monthaye, Animation Supervisors – Nicolas Capitaine, Hanne Galvez & Nils Robin, Artistic Direction – Mikael Robert. Production Company – Everybody on Deck/Je Suis Bien Content/Ev/L Prod/Plume Finance/France 3 Cinema/Shein Conseil/Gebka Films/Pictanovo Avec le Soutien de la Region Hauts-de-France/Amopix/MK2 Films/Canal+/Cine+/France Televisions/La Region Nouvelle-Acquitaine/Magellis, Avec le Soutien du Departement du Charente/La Region Reunion/La Region Grand Est/Strasbourg Eurometropole/CNC/Centre National du Cinema et de l’Image Animee/La Sacem/La Procirep/L’Angoa.
Voices
Lea Drucker (Aline Ruby), Daniel Njo Lobe (Carlos Rivera), Mathieu Amalric (Chris Royjacker), Marie Bouvet (Roberta Williams), Sebastien Chassagne (Inspector Simon Gordeaux), Marthe Keller (Beryl), Genevieve Doang (Jun Chow)
Plot
Private detective Aline Ruby and her partner Carlos Rivera, a former police officer who was killed and now exists in a duplicate body with his head as a hologram, return from Earth to Noctis city on Mars having arrested the hacker Roberta Williams. They arrive back on Mars only to find the warrant for Roberta has been erased from the system whereupon they have no choice but to let her go. They are then hired by the father of Jun Chow, a student who was murdered by a jailbroken robot. In investigating, they discover that Jun was using duplicate bodies and that the robot that killed her had its control taken over by an outside program. With society living in fear of amok robots, they realise that someone has found a means of taking over robots en masse.
Mars Express was a debut feature for French director Jeremie Perin who has been working as an animator since the early 2000s. His most notable work was with the animated tv series Latsman (2016- ).
French science-fiction has a peculiar fascination with Film Noir and adjacent topics. There was the classic Alphaville (1965) where Jean-Luc Godard juxtaposed classic noir images of a gumshoe detective onto an SF story, while Tykho Moon (1996) was very noirish in tone. Mars Express comes the closest to the animated Renaissance (2006), which transposed Noir into a futuristic Paris.
Mars Express makes a confident use of Cyberpunk tropes (although you suspect its colours are a little too bright rather than darkgrim for it to fully sit as a Cyberpunk work). Within the first few scenes, we are introduced to an apartment where the resident peels the fur off their robot cat; where the heroine goes for a drink but has a chip that institutes a sobriety lock on the fridge; where we meet her partner who has been uploaded into a robot body with a hologram head; and discussion of the jailbreaking of control codes on robots. The story continues to introduce a wild array of themes from rogue androids, duplicate bodies, mind jacking, memory wipes and synthetic prostitutes.
It is Film Noir but given an SF setting and the adept and well-read employment of SF tropes. The characters are well drawn – you have sympathy for Carlos the uploaded detective and his efforts to reconnect with his family despite them shooting at him every time he turns up at the door of his former home. This leads to a sad and tragic ending – and even something of a surprise transcendental apotheosis.
The film offers impressive visions of Noctis city, of the Mars Express shuttle taking off on a huge curved launchpad, and some great action scenes as Aline and Carlos huddle from armed assassins inside an overridden car protected only by crash foam. The animation is plain and in clear lines – this is not the full artistic vision of Pixar et al – but what we get is a modest and well-made film.
Trailer here