Mars

You have to admire the ambitions of Mars, a ‘global event’ series from producers Ron Howard and Brian Grazer.

Their docudrama series hopes to reignite our yearning for space travel and educate us about the challenges and dreams to colonise Mars. If we are to continue as a species, it argues, then we must leave the planet in order to save it.

Combining actors with scientist interviews is equally ambitious in this 6 episode miniseries, requiring the viewer to shift from genre to genre along the way.

For its drama component the year is 2033, and a crew is leaving Earth for a 7 month journey to Mars in a first step towards colonisation. But like all good space movies (especially those by Ron Howard) something goes terribly wrong. Astronauts in peril is the stuff of Apollo 13, Gravity and The Martian, with Howard on familiar turf.

But to reach Mars by 2033, we first had to lay down the foundations in 2016 which is where the Documentary element steps in. There are bite-size interviews with scientists and experts from SpaceX, which is launching the first ‘returnable’ rocket they hope to land and re-use.

The ‘real present’ +  ‘fictionalised future’ is a bit of a challenge for the viewer, and it never quite bridged the divide for me. American Mission Commander Ben Sawyer (played by Ben Cotton) is earnest in his description of this first human Mars mission aboard the fictional Daedalus. With limited screentime to dramatise the project’s overall pitch, I never really connected emotionally to its characters, at least on the same level as movie characters.

By contrast the science grabs, including by luminaries such as Neil deGrasse Tyson, was so brief as to feel like vox pops. Sometimes it was tricky to work out whether what was on screen was fact or ‘faction.’

But the overall premise, that we can and must, reach the red planet is a fascinating argument, with failure, risk and innovation at its very red centre. Whether America can step up its space race under its new president-elect is a question unaddressed.

This ‘global event’ -which includes a theme co-written by Nick Cave- might have been more effective as either one of its two genres, to avoid being a bit of a space oddity.

Mars airs 7:30pm Sunday on National Geographic.