Established in the year 2200, Mars Express Follows Aline and Carlos, a cyber-enhanced private eye and his synthetic android partner, as they hunt down a hacker connected to the illegal jailbreaking of assistive robots on Earth and Mars. What begins as a cut-and-dry case of stopping one of the many rogue coders unleashing self-actualizing machines with extreme prejudice quickly turns into an even greater ordeal as the tip of the iceberg when their case becomes intertwined with the mysterious disappearance of a young woman, a conspiracy involving cutting-edge biological technology, and a Pandora’s box of robotic autonomy threatening to collapse an already fragile society.
Animator Jeremy Perrin’s 2023 debut feature film Mars Express It feels like an albatross of an animated sci-fi movie that reminds you how powerful genre can be when clarity and craft are in charge. Clocking in at a tight 88 minutes, it almost immediately acquires the feeling of “they don’t make ’em like that anymore”, not by chasing nostalgia, but by using the tools of its genre with precision rather than flash. Those devices are certainly highly familiar framings of cyberpunk concerns, speculative technology, and humans’ uncertain relationship with technology.
But here, those ideas don’t seem derivative; They feel refreshing, as if pulled from a bygone era of animation when ambition mattered more than trend-chasing. Mars Express It moves forward with the confidence of a story that knows atmosphere only hits when the engine underneath is actually built on a drivable road. And Mars Express It has that engine, delivering a timeless, resonant story that burrows its way into your brain, daring you to find another work that scratches the same neon-drenched itch that it does.
What is exposed is a slow-burning mystery made up of a artificial proliferation of ideas – robot autonomy, human weakness, corporate excess, and all the uneasy seams that tie them together. Each piece ties into the premise without ever dulling it by overextending itself, giving the world that rare lived-in feel that feels discovered rather than constructed. It’s the kind of story that feels “old” only in the sense that nobody makes it like this anymore.
While any and all things cyberpunk already garner an extensive level of intrigue from their visual appearance alone, crucially, Mars Express It brings to mind something that genre creator Mike Pondsmith spent decades preaching to deaf ears: Cyberpunk isn’t an aspiration — it’s a warning. The film’s far-fetched future is an exemplary example of how that meaning has been hopelessly obliterated in pop culture, where neural implants and augmented bodies sold at a premium by corporate oligarchs shine like toys to the masses until they’re confronted with the reality that every system hesitates. In Mars ExpressTechnological progress is less notable than the invention of the wheel; This is Windows asking for another update which inexplicably crashes your PC.
That ethos is evident throughout the film’s world-building. Surgical machines require mid-procedure firmware updates while doctors keep absent-mindedly scrolling on their phones. Co-workers’ inside jokes become even more existentially isolating as they’re revealed on a group call inside their minds — you need an invitation to find out why everyone was laughing at the crime scene. Self-driving cars will wander around nearby accidents without their passengers checking in to see if anyone is OK. Mars Express It’s a world where convenience numbs humanity, chaos isolates rather than connects, and breaking machines out of jail is a crime worthy of condemnation with the utmost prejudice. In short, all the fixings of a cyberpunk world where human-machine coexistence goes awry in so many ways that it’s too normal to notice until it’s too late. So, a perfect world for a cyber-noir film for our private investigators to fight backfoot to pull the thread that leads the world into a more shambles.
Without a doubt, this is a helluva-looking film that’s brutal when it needs to be, explosive when it wants to be, and animated by a tactile sense of weight and momentum that keeps its camera shifting between first-person shocks, shoulder-tension, and sweeping dynamic compositions. Furthermore, none of it ever feels flat or decorative; Every scene, from the macro of establishing shots of its sweaty, dense, neon-drenched clubs to the micro expressions of its composition, deepens the groove of a story that never loses its momentum and only tightens its grip on you as its murder mystery unfolds.
What’s most impressive, however, is how much the film communicates without stopping to explain itself further. Its world, rules, and emotional stakes come through the old-school discipline of showing rather than telling. And the film trusts its audience to pick up on the rhythms of its society, the friction of its inhabitants and automatons, and the quiet tragedies embedded in the everyday occurrences of its characters’ lives, while its central investigation remains humming at every turn. It’s a balancing act that, on paper, should feel like spinning plates, yet somehow it’s pulled off with ease by production studio Everybody on Deck.
At the center of that balancing act is the couple who is carrying the whole thing. Aline is your future remake of the typical gumshoe that has worn her out: sarcastic, battle-scarred, sharp-tongued, and projecting a tough exterior that barely hides how hungry she is for real human connection. The film never emphasizes this; It lets you see the cracks in the quiet, deeply human moments as she tries to move forward. Carlos, a synthetic man whose stuff is under Netflix’s iceberg converted carbon The irony is that the sign is his closest bond. Together, they’re the force that draws the film’s emotional gravity, establishing a sci-fi world that could easily collapse under the weight of its ideas into a single masterwork in which you’re not so much led as you are allowed to stumble, as the film trusts you to pick out what matters in its nuances without ever guiding your hand.
what’s left in it Mars Express‘The Wake is a sharp, criminally underappreciated gem that’s far truer to the spirit of cyberpunk than most stories that feature the label. And it does so with a steady hand, never letting the cool factor of its lush aesthetics outweigh the story it serves.
You can rent or buy Mars Express On Prime Video, Apple TV, Fandango at Home, Google Play or YouTube.
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