When the Flaming Lips revealed in 2001 that they were working on a science fiction film, fans acqainted with their loud, spectacle-driven live show jumped for joy. The Lips has just created two space rock classics, The Soft Bulletin and Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots, and possessed a seemingly bottomless hat of tricks to shock audiences into blissed-out, blood-stained freakouts buried under pounds of confetti.
Well, Christmas on Mars has finally landed on planet Earth and the verdict is, well, not nearly as bad as you expected. Directed by Lips frontman Wayne Coyne and “Okie Noodling” director Brad Beesley, the film tells the story of (what else?) an astronaut colony hallucinating inside a dying space outpost on Mars. Faced with certain death on Christmas Eve, our heroic astronauts – played by a cast of both core and peripheral members of the indie rock universe including Steve Burns, Modest Mouse leader Isaac Brock, the prolific Adam Goldberg, SNL comic Fred Armisen, Elijah Wood, and what seems to be the entire Coyne clan – are visited by a messianic martian played by Coyne who (spoiler alert?) saves humanity.
As with any Flaming Lips album, the plot is secondary to the look and feeling, which is intense, absurd, and psychedelic. The film is a study on heavy-handed symbolism, which is sort of explained in Coyne’s delightfully free-associative explanation that precedes the movie. Coyne’s finest moments have always come from his maximalist musical and multimedia gestures, and Christmas on Mars bursts with stylistic flourishes the Lips have been cultivating for years: jarring Oz-like cuts into color; close-ups fetishizing gorey biological matter; enough vaginal imagery to make any stoned perennial adolescent giggle; and a story that seems to stumble drunkenly among the sublime and profound.
The film’s soundtrack, scored by the Lips with producer Dave Fridmann, is subtle and erie constant hum that lifts us out of the morass of the distractingly grainy black and white cinematography. (A little more contrast would have gone a long way.) Yes, the film was done on a minimalist’s budget, and we’d like to overlook these flaws in the production. But surely the Lips could have found some way to fashion a brand of amateurish filmmaking that created a “Blair Witch Project” kind of naturalism. At least if that’s what they were going for. Instead, the production quality is more rooted in “Eraserhead,” which really is only acceptable if your first name is David and your last name is Lynch. The trouble here is that the film’s look ends up hitching Wayne Coyne’s imagination to the ground when it really wants to rocket into the heavens, pardon the pun.
I wish I could add “Christmas On Mars” to the pantheon of great, trippy sci-fi movies, or even rank it among the Lips greatest achievements in spectacle engineering. From “Zaireeka” to car stereo listening parties, to fuzzy mascots and naked dancers, the Lips rank among indie rock’s most beloved envelope pushers. But unfortunately the movie never really takes us anywhere new, besides giving Lips fans the opportunity to revel in the spirit of one of their favorite bands at play in their backyard, which will undoubtedly be enough for some. [C+]
“Christmas On Mars” contains violence, insanity, and a squad of giant outer labiae.
