Ghosts of Mars, which fits into that third category, is easily the director's least effective work; it's a dumb action movie/sci-fi/western hung on the skeleton of a slapdash plot. The storyline is underdeveloped and, it seems to me, very much underthought (more on that later), and the movie seems to prefer gunfire to a decent script. Carpenter shows some nice directorial dazzle in staging scenes from multiple points-of-view--first we see what happened to one character, then we see another's experiences at that same time--and the way he slips back and forth in narrative time is clear and, for the most part, enhances a plot that definitely needs enhancing.

And the plot's the problem--it's so full of holes that it can't stand. For one thing, if the Martians can possess any human they want, why wouldn't they possess someone, kill the host, and move on to the next person. And if each of these humans is possessed by a Martian spirit, why would our heroes go killing the human hosts? As the movie shows at some points and conveniently forgets at others, when a host is killed, the Martian flies about and inhabits another body. If a dozen humans fight a hundred or so Martians and insists on killing them, they'd all be possessed in no time flat. This could have been explained away, but it isn't; one of the characters mentions something about the mist that represents the Martian ghosts "traveling on the wind"--though we see it doing otherwise at some points--and the subject is dropped. And speaking of the characters, they're all strictly from the sci-fi stockpile. The veteran, the flawed hero, the rookie, the cocky hornball, and so on. Only Ice Cube's "Desolation" Williams has some potential, in a Riddick sort of way (that's Vin Diesel in Pitch Black, folks), but he's underused. The actors themselves are largely up to their limited tasks, but they, like Carpenter's directing, are trying to give meaning to a movie that doesn't want it. (Dec 21, 2001)