MovieMartyr.com - Mercano the Martian

Mercano the Martian, a low-budget animated film from Argentina that addresses that country’s current financial straits and larger issues of globalization, unfortunately doesn’t take itself seriously enough to be truly biting satire. It’s made with crude animation that isn’t much more sophisticated than that of the average web-based Flash cartoon (which is to say not much uglier than the latest Rugrats blockbuster), and that distinct lack of visual excitement lends to it an underground vibe that it essentially squanders by hewing too closely to the template of countless big budget, no-brainer animated spectacles. The first scene in this Buenos Aires-set romp shows a looting in which the looters can’t decide which of the mass-produced wares that lay in front of them, if any, is worth lugging home, and that’s unfortunately about the wittiest moment in the movie. The plot picks up properly with the introduction of the titular character, an alien that is stranded on our planet after he travels to Earth to revenge the death of his beloved pet, who was struck by an unmanned Earth satellite probe.

This setup that promises plenty of fish-out-of-water laughs, but after we see the little Martian’s frustrating attempts to log onto the internet so he can ask his buddies for a ride home, there aren’t many to be had, mostly because he interacts with very few actual people. Very much a movie of the moment, Mercano’s concerns are with the emotional disconnectedness of our computer-driven society and the subsequent commercialization of cyberspace. Mercano’s lone earthbound friend is a boy that he meets online and, before long, thanks to an evil corporation’s theft of his planet’s technology, 98% of our planet is jacked into an interactive digitized shopping mall. Even the dissidents in this leisure-driven society are initially too placated by the allure of consumerism to challenge it. If that setup sounds promising, I am not doing a good job of relaying the film’s failings. Ideas are clearly present here, but the treatment, which usually tramples any conflict by reducing it to bloody slapstick is only about only about as highbrow as The Matrix. Unlike The Matrix, though, since Mercano is so cheaply made and poorly paced, it fails as even as a silly spectacle. There’s no escaping with either film the feeling that the anti-commercial message being espoused lies at odds with the glorified violence that’s being sold to audiences in these films and throughout our culture. Furthermore, the choice to use CGI to render the peaceful planet that Mercano hails from is an odd one considering the thematic use of technology. Just before Mercano’s ending, the supposedly enlightened aliens from that planet joke about the triviality of life on earth. It’s unfortunately more disturbing than funny to see that this is a sentiment that the filmmaker seems to share, since he can’t even take his own apocalyptic ending seriously.

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05-04-03

Jeremy Heilman