Mars Express

If you die on Mars in the year 2200, your family doesn’t necessarily need to buy a headstone; if your insurance is high-end enough, they just buy a "back-up." You return as a digital ghost in a synthetic chassis—a "shadow" of your former self that looks like you and talks like you, but legally possesses the same civil rights as a microwave. This is the jagged, unsentimental starting point for Mars Express, a film that arrives like a shot of pure adrenaline to a science fiction genre that has felt a bit drowsy lately.

I watched this on my laptop while eating a bowl of cold leftover pad thai, and the orange grease on the noodles felt weirdly thematic given the Martian dust clogging every frame. It’s a film that demands your full attention, not because it’s confusing, but because it’s so densely packed with visual ideas that blinking feels like a tactical error.

A Noir Heart in a Titanium Ribcage

The story follows Aline Ruby (voiced with a weary, cigarette-stain grit by Léa Drucker) and her partner Carlos Rivera (Daniel Njo Lobé). The twist? Carlos is one of those aforementioned "shadows." He’s an android backup of a soldier who died five years ago, struggling to relate to a daughter who is now older than he is and a wife who has understandably moved on. Their dynamic is the emotional anchor of the film, grounded in a deadpan, professional shorthand that feels earned rather than scripted.

They are hired by a wealthy, oily tech mogul named Chris Royjacker (the always excellent Mathieu Amalric) to find a missing hacker. What starts as a standard "missing person" gig quickly spirals into a conspiracy involving "brain farms," political corruption, and the potential liberation of the planet's robotic underclass. It’s Blade Runner meets Chinatown, but with a distinct French sensibility that favors existential dread over neon-soaked sentimentality. It makes most modern American sci-fi look like it’s still playing with Duplo blocks.

Precision Engineering and Kinetic Chaos

Director Jérémie Périn and his team at Je suis bien content have crafted something rare in the age of "floaty" CGI: an action movie with actual weight. The animation style is a clean, crisp blend of 2D characters and 3D environments that reminds me of the best 1980s OVA anime like Patlabor or Ghost in the Shell. Every punch, gunshot, and high-speed chase feels deliberate.

There is a sequence midway through the film involving a breakout at a university that is a masterclass in action clarity. There’s no shaky-cam here to hide poor choreography. Instead, we get wide shots that allow us to see the tactical geometry of the fight. The sound design by Fred Avril punctuates the violence with the clack of ceramic plates and the whir of servos, making the robotic combat feel incredibly physical. When an android gets hit, it doesn't just "break"—it malfunctions in ways that feel terrifyingly grounded in engineering.

The pacing is relentless, clocking in at a lean 89 minutes. In a contemporary landscape where every mid-tier blockbuster feels the need to push three hours, Mars Express is a refreshing reminder that you can build a whole universe and tear it down again in an hour and a half if you don’t waste time explaining things that the audience can see with their own eyes.

The Ghost in the Modern Machine

What strikes me most about Mars Express is how it fits into our current cultural moment. We are currently drowning in discourse about Large Language Models and the "ethics" of AI, but most of it feels abstract and corporate. Jérémie Périn tackles these themes by looking at the plumbing—the literal hardware and code that would govern a society built on robotic labor.

The film bypasses the "Do robots have souls?" cliché and asks more uncomfortable questions: What happens when the things we built to serve us decide they’d rather just leave? Why are we so obsessed with making our tools look and act like us? It’s a film that feels cynical about humanity but deeply curious about consciousness.

Interestingly, this was a project born of pure persistence. Périn and co-writer Laurent Sarfati spent over five years getting this made on a budget of roughly $8 million. To put that in perspective, that’s about 4% of the budget for a typical Pixar movie. You can see every cent of that money on the screen, not in "spectacle" for spectacle's sake, but in the sheer detail of the world-building—from the way the self-driving cars dock to the terrifying designs of the "organic" computers.

Mars Express is a sleek, mean, and deeply intelligent piece of adult animation. It’s the kind of movie that reminds you why you fell in love with sci-fi in the first place—not for the laser beams, but for the way it uses the future to hold a mirror up to our own messy, compromised present. It hasn't had the massive theatrical rollout it deserves, so seek it out on streaming or Blu-ray. It’s the best trip to the Red Planet you’ll take this decade.