Mars Express is a French sci-fi animated film directed by Jérémie Périn (who also directed the Lastman series). It was released in France in 2023.
In the early 23th century, Mars has been terraformed and colonized, and society has become Post-Cyberpunk. Many people are cyborgs, and robots are omnipresent. Aline Ruby is a Private Detective who operates along with Carlos Rivera, a robot who is the backup copy or her late former partner. Hired to investigate the mysterious disappearance of a young hacker, they slowly uncover a conspiracy that could transform life in the solar system.
This film provides examples of:
- A.I. Is a Crapshoot: Played with. Many people are afraid of robots getting rid of the safeguards that prevent them from assaulting people. It eventually happens, but they mostly set themselves free and flee human-inhabited planets.
- The Alcoholic: Aline is in AA and has an implant that prevents alcohol from being served to her by devices. She ultimately disables it and goes off the wagon, appearing drunk in several subsequent scenes.
- All Deaths Final: Throughout the film, it is made clear that characters who die can be somewhat resurrected by uploading their memories into a robot body, Carlos being the one in his group of three friends accepted eagerly by both Aline and Royjacker. Tragically, Royjacker's plan to get rid of robots removes this method of immortality just as both he and Aline get killed, ensuring they won't get to come back like Carlos did. It breaks the poor man.
- Androids and Detectives: The protagonists are a female Hardboiled Detective and the backup copy robot of her dead partner.
- Anti-Villain: The movie's Big Bad, Chris Royjacker, is motivated by a genuine belief that robots represent an existential threat to humans, and is actively doing everything he can to ensure Aline and Carlos are not harmed by the chaos his plan is meant to unleash.
- Aw, Look! They Really Do Love Each Other: Aline and Carlos despite being friends at work argue a lot, but when the situation calls it, Carlos defends his friend a few times.
- Automated Automobiles: Cars drive themselves and can be summoned remotely to pick you up. While driving down a highway, Aline notices one car that contains only cardboard boxes and a dog. During a crash, cars will fill with safety gel and project a zone around them that other cars will automatically steer around, allowing automated recovery robots to rescue the occupants.
- The Bad Guy Wins: Sure, Chris Royjacker is defeated in the end, but he's just a tool for the Board of Directors, who got exactly what they wanted by removing all robots, ensuring that human society will be dependent on their organic technology in the future.
- Benevolent A.I.: Despite the fear of rebelling, the robots shown in the movie appear to be nothing but loyal and gentle beings to humans, at worst being a bit snarky. This stays even in ending where a few robots confront Carlos about Aline's demise and send their regards.
- Bittersweet Ending: Though heavy on bitter side.
- Pretty much almost the entire cast is either dead or inprisoned, with The Board getting away with their crimes, Aline dying from the fatal shot and Carlos shooting Chris due to pure resignation and later joining other robots in leaving the planets. In the end robots free themselves from humans and escape into the outer space. This sounds great for them but what about humans? Will they make robots again and grow out of their prejudice against them?
- And depending how to interpret it robots sacraficing their bodies so the spaceships can collect their data may or not be Death of Personality for them, giving we don't see the fate of any of them after transcendence. However it should be noted that Carlos outright says it's a planned suicide and that the rest of robots don't actually mind that and see this as new beggining.
- Break the Badass: The case Aline and Carlos are investigating grinds both of them down more and more, with Aline becoming completely dependent on alcohol for basic functions by the midway point, and Carlos crossing the Despair Event Horizon when the case leaves his two best friends dead with no chance of being brought back like he was.
- Custody Battle: Carlos attempts to visit his daughter, but his ex-wife and her husband violently reject him. That scene looks like a case of Fantastic Racism (and this is only the daughter of the man he is a backup copy of), although he says later that his ex-wife left him because he was violent to her. He lies about this to Aline, pretending to be still seeing his daughter.
- Cyborg: Aline and many other people have cybernetic implants that allow them to do a wide variety of things. Aline has Electronic Eyes that can take pictures, see in infrared, and identify substances in the environment. She can also have conference calls with people in her head. There are also people, called "augments," with more significant cybernetic implants that change their faces, give them Super-Strength and speed, and provide built-in weapons like an extendable hand blade.
- Decoy Protagonist:
- The first person we see is Dominique, who lounges in her dorm room and deals with her messy robot cat. She's then immediately murdered, and we cut to a scene with our real protagonists, Aline and Carlos.
- The film presents Aline as the protagonist of the remaining film, with her taking the lead in the investigation while Carlos mostly serves as her back-up and sidekick. But Aline is herself killed in the third act, and the film continues following Carlos, who has the only complete character arc in the film, revealing him to have been the main character all along.
- Distracted by the Sexy: When questioning Jun's Hot Teacher, Aline's eyes linger on his muscular torso as he changes his shirt. She later has a one-night stand with him, though she might not have gotten very far before puking.
- Failure Hero: Aline and Carlos are very slow making headway in the case, and every breakthrough is undone by the bad guys being revealed to have been one step ahead of them the whole time. In the end, Aline ends up dead and Carlos leaves the Milky Way with the other robots out of despair.
- Fantastic Noir: This film has elements of Film Noir (most obviously a Hardboiled Detective protagonist) recycled in a futuristic setting.
- Fantastic Racism: There is general antipathy on Earth against robots, who are blamed for destroying human jobs. A violent demonstration against robots takes place in which a mob smashes any robots in sight. Things are just slightly more subtle on Mars. Carlos being the backup copy of a dead human being, he seems to suffer from being a machine, and some other backup copy of a dead person hands him a card to a support group.
- Finale Title Drop: The next-to-last shot of the film is a pan over the spaceship with all of the uploaded memories of all robots on its way out of the Solar System, showing that it is named "Mars Express".
- Foreshadowing: Carlos is established to be an older model of robot who is unable to download updates to his software because his memory is full. Late in the movie this prevents him from being affected by the takeover program that is pushed out onto all the other robots as part of the villain's plan.
- Genre Deconstruction: Hardboiled Detective story with a pair of human and cyborg cops investigating a case involving a hacker and disappeared college students? And the main villain turns out to be the head of the large corporation that manufactures androids and pre-planned this "insurrection" against humanity? Sounds pretty original for a cyberpunk story. Except the uprising in question actually turns out to be the corporation's way of disposing them along with the data of prisoners' mind that's inside them. Not only that, Chris Royjacker, the corporation CEO in question, doesn't get any arrest for his involvement as his status prevent police from arresting him, as they would in real life. When the ruse is up, the Board of Directors turns out to be the one behind the "takeover" program and made Royjacker into their scapegoat. So no matter how Aline and Carlos bring justice to everything, it won't matter as the board already got away with it. And by the moment Aline and Carlos learn the truth while the uprising is happening, it's all too late, and Aline was shot dead along with Chris Royjacker.
- Greater-Scope Villain: The Board of Directors.
- Great Offscreen War: The Novgorod Insurrection, a Robot Rebellion that left all three main characters Shell-Shocked Veterans and Carlos in particular dead, which is a major factor in the prejudice against robots in the setting.
- Hardboiled Detective: Aline is a female example. She is tough, cynical, and even has a drinking problem.
- Hot Teacher: Jun's professor is a handsome and fit young man to whom Aline takes an instant shine. Apparently he almost never has sex with humans anymore and prefers to screw his golden-skinned unicorn-woman sexbot.
- Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Aline and Carlos have their demons but are moral people at heart.
- Minor Crime Reveals Major Plot: In true noir fashion, what starts as a routine disappearance investigation causes the leads to discover a conspiracy among the setting's corporate elite to trigger a robotic exodus in favor of Organic Technology, with their own best friend as the mastermind of the plot.
- My God, What Have I Done?: Royjacker spends his last few seconds alive in abject, horrified despair that his plan got his friend Aline killed.
- Neck Snap: Jun's roommate Dominique is murdered when a fake policeman grabs her face and wrenches her head around, snapping her neck with cybernetic strength.
- Only the Leads Get a Downer Ending: The movie ends with the robots leaving the Milky Way Galaxy for parts unknown, finally free of human oppression, but the two human leads are dead, and the robot lead has crossed the Despair Event Horizon.
- Organic Technology: it is an emergent technology that is still struggling to gain acceptance compared to 'regular' robots and androids. However it seems that odd looking creatures in aquariums are being grown into some kind of personal computers.
- Pastiche: And Genre Throwback to 1980s/90s cyberpunk sci-fi movies. Director Jérémie Périn being an avowed sci-fi fan and wanted his first solo directorial feature debut to have everything what he loved about the genre since his childhood. He named The Terminator, RoboCop, Ghost in the Shell, and Time Masters as his inspirations.
- Post-Cyberpunk: This is a cyberpunk universe, but not clearly worse than today. Possibly due to much of the action happening in a wealthy city on Mars, and almost every scene happening in the day, this film feels quite lighthearted in spite of all the dark elements.
- Private Detective: Aline is a private detective and apparently something of a bounty hunter. Her first job is catching a hacker on Earth and returning to Mars with the captive. She's next hired to find Jun Chow, a more traditional private detective job.
- The Reveal: Carlos already jailbroke himself. He's just been faking it this whole time.
- Ridiculously Human Robot: Zigzagged. Some robots are completely indistinguishable from humans unless closely examined or viewed with specialized sensors, while others are very obviously robotic in nature.
- Satire:
- Of French politics. At some point a robot insurrection happens. Some offscreen news conversations can be heard that seem to be a satire of what you can hear on the French news whenever something bad happens, with mainstream journalists trying to shut down leftwing politicians with unfair tactics and loaded questions. "Est-ce que vous condamnez les violences ?" ("Do you condemn these violent acts?") certainly sounds like something that was heard in 2023, when some allegedly violent demonstrators faced much harsher police violence, but only the violence of the former could be talked about on mainstream news media. It's such a common journalist question in times of protests in France that it's become a stapple of parodies.
- The city of Noctis is based on Silicon Valley. Humanity has created this pretty city on Mars mostly for the wealthy, while not solving any of the more important problems such as Earth ecology.
- There's a rich person that introduces on his lecture a new device that will change the entire technology, which is an earphone that looks like genitals. Later we see the same person that has a trouble using it. It's pretty similar situation to modern tech devices that CEOs promise they will change the history and turn out to be mediocre gadget at best.
- During the news report on the slide, there's a text saying "alt-right anonymous organize mass suicide using 44chan".
- Sexbot: Aline and Carlos investigate a brothel where all of the prostitutes are synthetic. Jun's professor also keeps a rather ostentatious, golden-skinned sexbot with a unicorn horn.
- Shell-Shocked Veteran: All three main characters, Aline, Carlos, and Royjacker are haunted by their experience in the Novgorod Insurrection, with Carlos being long dead and living in a robot shell, Aline The Alcoholic, and Royjacker being driven by Fantastic Racism against robots.
- Shoot the Shaggy Dog: In the end, Aline and Carlos' efforts are for nothing. The bad guys plan goes off without a hitch, Aline and Royjacker end up dead, and Carlos faces Uncertain Doom. The only bright spot in the ending is that the oppression of the robots is over, and even that is something the villains did rather than the heroes.
- Show, Don't Tell: This film manages to expose many sci-fi concepts without explaining them. Of course there are some exceptions, but this concept seems to have been kept in mind.
- Spot the Thread: Aline notices that Jun's father seems to snap his heels together when he meets her, but he denies having any military background. Carlos confirms that Jun's father has no military service in his file. Later, it's revealed that the man Aline met was a cyborg assassin imitating Jun's father.
- Super-Reflexes: Some robots, such as Carlos, are superhumanly fast and accurate.
- Super-Strength: Some robots are super strong, and Carlos often lifts heavy things.
- Three Laws-Compliant: Zig-zagged. Robots can't harm a human being, or say swear words, and there is at least seven rules. Carlos has a trick he can do to avoid obeying people by going offline. It's a major crime to "jailbreak" robots and give them total freedom over their actions.
- Uncertain Doom: The ultimate fate of the robots is never made clear. Beryl implies that she worked on the plan with Royjacker to set robots free from human oppression so they can live in space in a digital environment, or the robots minds will be blended together resulting in Death of Personality for all of botkind. The film never answers which is true. The only thing that can be said for sure is that humans can't hurt robots anymore.
- Unwitting Pawn: Unable to find Jun himself, Royjacker manipulates Aline and Carlos into leading his men right to her and getting her killed. The entire case is revealed to have been a setup. Royjacker himself is revealed to be this to the Board of Directors of his own company, who are more than happy to take advantage of his ideological prejudice against robots to push them out of the Milky Way in favor of Organic Technology, then sacrifice him once he's no longer needed.
- We Used to Be Friends: Aline, Carlos, and Chris Royjacker served in the army together as shown in the photo hung at Chris's office. When Aline learns that Royjacker planned Jun Chow and her roommate's assassination, they no longer see themselves as friends, though Chris still attempts to do that and is shocked at Alice's demise.
- You Are Too Late: Every significant break Aline and Carlos make in the case is undone within seconds thanks to the bad guys being one step ahead of them the whole time. This becomes outright tragic in the climax where Carlos is literally only a second late in preventing Aline's death.