Books Mars Express: Cyberpunk Noir Will Never Die (And I’m Happy About That) — Reactor Home / Science Fiction Film Club / Mars Express: Cyberpunk Noir Will Never Die (And I’m Happy About That) Mars Express: Cyberpunk Noir Will Never Die (And I’m Happy About That) A truly rich, compelling sci movie that's flown under the radar for too long… Published on December 10, 2025 Credit: Gebeka Films Share Credit: Gebeka Films Mars Express (2023) Directed by Jérémie Périn. Written by Laurent Sarfati and Jérémie Périn. Starring Léa Drucker, Mathieu Amalric, Daniel Njo Lobé, and Marie Bouvet. Every time I watch a film about artificial intelligence, I start by looking around for information about the history of the concept. And every time I look, I am reminded that the concept is much older and broader than I can reasonably cover in my column, because humans have pretty much always dreamed about building intelligent machines. There are stories about clever people (or clever gods) building human-like automata in ancient China and Greece, as well as in other cultures and lore from around the world, and while the ideas and style of the stories have evolved significantly over time, they have never gone away. Whether it’s Homer describing the mechanical helpers in Hephaestus’ workshop or Muslim scholar Ismail al-Jazari imagining designs for mechanical servants and musicians or Wolfgang von Kempelen’s Mechanical Turk (which was not an automaton at all, though it was claimed to be for many decades), humans have always wanted to think we could make an artificial guy that acted just like a real guy. Of course, it has also been a favorite concept in science fiction since the genre’s earliest days , and in science fiction is where it happily resided for a long time. In the last few years, this idea seems to have come back around to something people crave in the real world, not just in fiction. That makes things a bit awkward for people (like me) who love stories about androids, robots, and artificial intelligence, while also having the burning urge to drop-kick anybody who anthropomorphizes shitty chatbots right into the ocean. Thankfully, AI in fiction can still be fascinating, and there are still sci fi writers making the most of it. Mars Express is a surprisingly wonderful example. Surprising because I haven’t seen anybody talking about it in sci fi or film circles since its release in 2023. I came across the title while I was specifically looking for recent films set on Mars, and I went in knowing nothing about it beyond the briefest summary. It may well have a niche cohort of fans out there, but it seems to have largely flown under the radar. That’s unfortunate, because this is a great movie. It’s classic cyberpunk noir following in the footsteps of the best of both those genres. It’s tightly plotted with engaging characters in a wonderfully rich world, and it has the guts to not pull any punches about the consequences of living in that world. Note: I’m going to spoil the premise and some of the cyberpunk worldbuilding in the film, but I’m not going to spoil the entire plot, because I think you should all go watch it. Director Jérémie Périn is not shy about naming his inspirations. He and co-writer Laurent Sarfati had previously worked on the French animated series Lastman (2016), based on the comics of the same name. (Lastman has been compared to the Dragon Ball franchise, but I don’t know enough about either to say how accurate that is.) For their first feature film they wanted to do something rather different. They went into Mars Express specifically aiming to craft a noir story with all the classic trappings: the hard-drinking private investigator, the contrast between a city’s surface and its underbelly, and characters getting caught up in conspiracies of the rich and powerful. In a 2024 interview with Polygon , he cites neo-noir films like Chinatown (1974) and The Long Goodbye (1973) as models for the idea, as well as political thrillers like All the President’s Men (1976) and Three Days of the Condor (1975). But Périn is an animator, not a New Hollywood auteur working in the 1970s, and an animator interested in neo-noir is inevitably going to be working in the very long shadow of some truly excellent Japanese animation. That influence is also obvious in Mars Express, which has a very ’90s anime visual style in its 2D animation. Mars Express opens with sudden and shocking violence. Dominique (Angéline Henneguelle), a student at a university on Mars, is murdered in her dorm room while her roommate, Jun (Geneviève Doang), hides in the bathtub. The murderer, who came to the door posing as a cop, also shoots their cute robotic cat, which is how we know he’s really evil. Then the film moves briefly to Earth, where a hacker named Roberta Williams (Marie Bouvet) and her android sidekick LEM (Thomas Roditi) are welcoming two potential clients in a hotel room. Roberta jailbreaks androids, which is illegal in this high-tech future; there are sentient artificial intelligences everywhere as a part of everyday life, but they are strictly controlled and regulated. We soon learn that jailbroken robots have a reputation for being unstable and even violent. (Alas, they don’t just want to be left alone to watch their shows. But maybe nobody has invented The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon yet.) Roberta’s clients, alas, are not real clients but a private investigator and her android sidekick. Aline Ruby (Léa Drucker) has been hired by the tech mogul Chris Royjacker (Mathieu Amalric) to find Roberta and retrieve or destroy some information she stole from his company. Aline’s own android sidekick, Carlos Rivera (Daniel Njo Lobé), is the sentient AI backup of her dead partner. All of that happens in about the first ten minutes. This is not a movie that wastes time, although it never feels like it’s rushing through its 89-minute runtime either. Right away the film lets us see the tension inherent in the android situation. Carlos died as a human, and he’s still here, as the same person with the same memories, but he’s been demoted from one class of being to another through no choice of his own. It’s obvious that this society really doesn’t know what to do with people existing in that limbo—a limbo the society has created for its own benefit. Aline and Carlos bring Roberta back to Mars, but her warrant has mysteriously disappeared (she is a hacker, after all), so they have to let her go. Royjacker is curiously unconcerned about this, because he’s certain the data she stole has been destroyed. Aline is ready to take on a new case. A worried father wants her to find his daughter, who turns out to be Jun, the college student who fearfully hid in the bathtub while her roommate was murdered. Because this is cyberpunk and noir, the different threads of the story are inevitably connected. Jun went missing after getting into trouble with both the university and the police for jailbreaking a robot at a school lab, although camera footage of that incident makes it’s pretty obvious that something else was going on. Aline and Carlos’ search for Jun takes them into different parts of the city, which also gives us a look at this vision of the future. This Mars is clean and open and bright, with the tidy city of Noctis existing beneath atmosphere domes. In previous films, we’ve seen Mars as an explored wilderness , a grimly stratified monarchy , a post-apocalyptic ruin , and a gritty slum , but this is the first time we’ve seen a Mars that looks like a pretty nice place to live. But, in true noir fashion, the attractive surface hides a much more complicated truth, because it’s also a city where a college student will create an android backup of herself to moonlight as a sex worker just to pay for tuition, where people will rent out their unconscious minds to do shady processing work, where wealthy men cheerfully talk about how they prefer robot girlfriends because they can simply turn them off whenever they get needy. Mars, in cinema and in all sci fi storytelling, has always been a place where we put ideas about humanity that we want to examine in a different context. The version of Mars that we see in Mars Express feels like a natural evolution of this. It’s familiar enough that we can easily see how it might sell itself as the high-tech utopia promised by insufferable tech bros, and it’s just far enough in the future that it’s dealing with problems we can easily anticipate but haven’t quite encountered yet. Aline is at first presented as the main character, as the hard-boiled private eye at the center of the complex case, but it’s Carlos’ story that hits the hardest. There’s a great deal of pain and discomfort in the way he moves through the world and how he interacts with other characters. In this future, everybody wants the benefits of having fully sentient robots, but nobody wants those robots to have any rights or self-determination—not even when those robots contain the minds and personalities and memories of people who were brought back from the dead. Aline still thinks of Carlos as her partner, and she talks to other robots as though they are people, but she still actively upholds the system that says they can’t be people, and they especially can’t be free people. Carlos’ ex-wife won’t let him see their daughter because it would be too complicated, even in a world where these back-up “ghosts” are fairly commonplace. Other androids and robots reach out to Carlos offering connection—they have their own fragile culture, in a way—but he feels disconnected from them as well. It all makes for an engaging and effective film. There is no separation between the technological element and the human element, because the intersection of the two is where the story happens. Cyberpunk and noir are well-matched genres because all crime stories are, on some level, about who gets to be treated as important in a society. That’s also what robot stories tend to be about. For all that humans have always imagined building an artificial guy that’s just like a real guy, we have also always had the self-awareness to know that we will be completely freaking about it when it happens. We can’t even agree that all humans deserve to be treated the same; we sure as hell aren’t going to make it easy when there are sentient machines as well. What it comes down to is that science fictional technology accelerates and amplifies all of the fundamental human darknesses that make a noir story: greed, violence, inequality, secrecy, conspiracy. There are always rich people treating poor people as disposable for their own gain. There are always people who hold conflicting beliefs about the systems of power they live in. There is always danger involved in confronting and opposing those systems. The details inevitably change as our world changes—and right now, at the end of the science fictional year of 2025, it’s impossible to ignore how much consternation and misery comes from what the richest assholes in the world think technology should accomplish to make them richer. That makes the story and themes of Mars Express uncomfortably timely, even while its obvious inspirations and the visual style have a retro feel. I love that a French film from 2023 can look like ’90s cyberpunk anime while referencing ’70s American crime films. I don’t mind at all that Périn obviously watched Ghost in the Shell (1995) and Blade Runner (1982) at an impressionable age, and obviously went through a New American cinema cinephile phase, and is now making his own movies inspired by thinking, “Damn, that’s cool, what if…?” I think it’s wonderful when great art inspires other art, and this is especially true when sci fi explores concepts that change as the world around us changes. What do you think about Mars Express? The whole time I was watching I kept thinking about how many times I’ve heard people in the sci fi community declare cyberpunk a dead genre. I’m glad they’ve always been wrong. Next week: We close out our exploration of Mars and this year of the Sci Fi Film Club year with the notorious “Worst Movies Ever Made” contender Santa Claus Conquers the Martians. It’s in the public domain and available all over the internet . Everywhere . I won’t watch the MST3K version (the last thing I ever want is for some dudes to be interrupting my movie viewing), but I suppose I understand if you want to do that this time… icon-paragraph-end Kali Wallace Author Kali Wallace studied geology and earned a PhD in geophysics before she realized she enjoyed inventing imaginary worlds more than she liked researching the real one. She is the author of science fiction, fantasy, and horror novels for children, teens, and adults, including the 2022 Philip K. Dick Award winner Dead Space . Her short fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, F&SF, Asimov’s, Reactor, and other speculative fiction magazines. Find her newsletter at kaliwallace.substack.com. Source: https://reactormag.com/mars-express-cyberpunk-noir-will-never-die-and-im-happy-about-that/