In 2003, a friend showed me The Flaming Lips' Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots DVD, a psychedelic visualization of music from their album of the same title. On that DVD was a trailer, which I assumed was fake, for a movie the band was making, called Christmas on Mars. This trailer featured frontman Wayne Coyne in a bad alien costume, a thin and frozen Santa Claus on an autopsy table, and the words "fantastical psychological adventure." Much to my surprise, the film turned out to be a reality, was released on DVD late in 2008, and proceeded to utterly disappoint.

The film is like a cross between another alternative rock band's sci-fi film, The Billy Nayer Show's The American Astronaut, and Eraserhead, both of which are very good. Christmas on Mars is about a crew member, Major Syrtis, on a Mars space station who is trying to make Christmas on the station into a special event. Unfortunately, his Santa Claus goes mad and runs out of the complex, freezing to death. At the same time, a green alien (whose real colors we get a glimpse of even though most of the film is in black and white) shows up, and Syrtis gets the idea to let him play the role of Santa.

Throughout this plot, the film snakes in all sorts of directions, looking for places to present weird imagery. In the opening scene, we see an odd image of space and a close-up of the alien's face as he steps into view, extracts a transportation orb from his mouth, and flies off. Then we see a woman crawl through a large vertical slit in a quarantine-like room, expose a few Matrix-like mechanical sockets on her body, drop a bloody egg-yolk in a vibrating bowl, and occasionally look over at a glass sphere in which is incubating an unborn baby, who appears to have developed his insides before his skin. There are two hallucination scenes that incorporate images that are literally pornographic except for the fact that they are presented in a surrealistic fashion. Actually, I can't recall a single mundane event.

Normally I would be lauding a film that goes so crazy, but this one is plagued with problems in four vital areas: the acting, the dialogue, the editing, and the set design, rendering it difficult to sit through and impossible to enjoy. Realistically, it should not be surprising that the film does not do well in these areas. There is, as far as I can tell, only one real actor in the film (Adam Goldberg). It was edited by George Salisbury, whose only editing experience consists of The Flaming Lips DVD U.F.O.s at the Zoo, which is a concert. The dialogue was written by Coyne, who is used to writing only songs. The set was built by Coyne himself in his own backyard.¹ Unfortunately, these excuses, though quite legitimate, don't elevate the quality of the film.

When the actors speak, they aren't talking with one another; they are announcing their lines. This, coupled with a sterile-sounding lack of reverb creates a distinctly artificial feel to their words (which is surprising, given the band's tendency to be audiophiles). Even in a film like this, it is important that dialogue comes across as authentic. The editing compounds this problem. There is often a strange, short pause before any character speaks, creating the feeling that they are waiting for the camera to point at them before they deliver their lines.

The dialogue itself does not help. In fact, it is often pointless. When we first see the main character, he watches two men in spacesuits as they set up a tiny Christmas tree. After narrating that the men remind him of moths, which itself makes no sense but could have passed as legitimately surrealistic had he not kept going with it, he begins ruminating on a personal moth-killing experience. This leads to further rumination about the meaninglessness of life, a theme which is picked up in a few other sections of the film. While this is also a legitimate direction for the film to take, the ontology of it does not mix with the original, surrealist statement, which, by its nature, can have no ontology. The end result of this, aside from the stylistic inconsistency, is the feeling that the movie is trying too hard to be strange, inserting nonsense just wherever it can without any heed for artistic integrity (even an integrity that hinges on weirdness, which in itself is fine).

I have another dialogue-related complaint, which I would not bother to bring up if it didn't comprise a substantial portion of the film. There is one character whose lines consist of nothing but profane exclamations. The profanity itself is not the problem; in fact a couple of his outbursts are quite funny. The problem is that the tone with which he speaks these lines sounds meant to convey intimidation, like a drill sergeant, but none of them actually mean anything. So, instead of becoming a character that uses profanity to enhance his degradation of others, he is someone who uses profanity because he can't think of anything powerful to say. What results is a lot of empty shouting. This may have been done purposefully, but either way, the emptiness of his lines becomes terribly annoying (not to mention his accent) when you're forced to listen to them for more than a couple minutes.

Finally, there is the set, which Coyne certainly realizes looks like something built by an amateur but which is not helped by that fact because it still looks so bad. It seems that Coyne was banking on its off-kilter nature to add strangeness, and it certainly does that, but that doesn't matter because it's just so ugly. I know most of us couldn't build anything comparable with the severely limited resources Coyne had. In fact, if a friend of mine had this in his backyard, I would play in it like a five-year-old every day. But successful backyard projects rarely make for good movie material. This one is no exception².

I have not enjoyed writing this review because I am a casual fan of The Flaming Lips, and I was really looking forward to Christmas on Mars once I found out it was actually being made. Unfortunately, when the first scene played, my only thought was Oh dear, please get better, and it never did. It may indeed be a "FANTASTICAL FILM FREAKOUT," as its tagline states, but overshadowing that is its poor quality all around.