Mars Express (2023)

Mars Express arrives as a French animated noir set on a terraformed Mars in 2200, and it conducts itself with the grim professionalism of a detective who has stopped expecting good news. Director Jérémie Périn has openly acknowledged lifting his structure from Chinatown and The Long Goodbye, then swapping the weary male lead for Aline Ruby, a private investigator with a dead partner and an android facsimile of him riding shotgun. The swap is deliberate and it registers. It is also the extent of the film's gender project. Aline is not a case study. She is a woman doing a job that noir traditionally reserves for men, and the film lets that sit without comment.

The political content lives in the margins, where a conspiracy thriller keeps its opinions. Brain farms, trafficked bodies, a wealthy industrialist pulling strings, and a robot underclass whose emancipation arrives as a quiet mass exodus into space. Périn has said the organic machines lampoon planned obsolescence, which is a genuine jab at corporate appetite, and the trafficking subplot carries a faint whiff of class allegory. The film frames all of it around machine consciousness, though. Race never enters the room. Neither does the climate, despite the setting, and the ensemble's diversity is a matter of French casting pragmatism instead of thesis.

What remains is a moody, well-built thriller that prefers atmosphere to instruction. No LGBTQ material. No body politics. No neurodivergence. No revisions to the historical record. The sermonizing is light and the cynicism is heavy, which is the correct ratio for this kind of picture.