When I took a film auteur class several years ago that studied Alfred Hitchcock, it was very fashionable to attack Brian De Palma. He was regarded as the most inconsistent of the "Brat Pack" (apart from John Milius, who was dismissed as a right-wing propagandist), and had angered the feminist tutors with Dressed to Kill (1980), perceived as blatantly misogynist.

Mission to Mars failed to resuscitate De Palma's critical reputation. Despite some spectacular visual effects and sound design, the film is a sprawling mess. Ennio Morricone's score is out of place. The NASA astronaut ensemble - Jim McConnell (Gary Sinise), Woody Blake (Tim Robbins), Luke Graham (Don Cheadle), Terri Fisher (Connie Nielsen) and Jerry O'Connell (Phil Ohlmyer) - have to cope with hackneyed lines and genre clichés. The film should have been left on the cutting-room floor.

That was the consensus amongst film critics, and if you read their reviews before seeing Mission to Mars, you probably would have confirmed their opinions. Let me offer a contrarian view about De Palma, as I did in the film auteur class. Because when I dug up late 1960s interviews with De Palma, in misplaced film journals, I found something that challenges these "received truths."

De Palma wanted to experiment with film form, and cited French "New Wave" director Jean-Luc Godard as an influence, just as much as Hitchcock. In one interview, conducted around 1969, De Palma stated that he wanted to merge Godard's aesthetics with the Hollywood classical form.

Godard experimented with visuals, with sound, with mise en scene, with multi-strand narrative, and with films that exposed the political economy of the filmmaking process. It speaks volumes about the state of film scholarship in the mass-media (which has become an extension of public relations) and the "amnesia" of critics that this "meta-level" in De Palma's work is not even perceived.

If you re-examine De Palma's recent work, the "meta-level" is there. Mission: Impossible (1996) had some sly comments about how Hollywood's increasing reliance on crews and technology has undermined the craft of filmmaking. Snake Eyes (1998) critiqued how omnipresent surveillance systems and casino simulacrums have undermined our personal identity and memories. They're not perfect films, but their insights were overlooked by film-going critics and a public that just marvelled at the visual effects and saw little else.

Mission to Mars has many of De Palma's central themes - how humanity survives in a technology-obsessed environment, why strange environments can trigger evolutionary "break-throughs", and what happens when groups and relationships face problems of existence (note to the Moral Majority: the film, gasp, favourably depicts a successful marriage). De Palma's debt to Godard (not just Stanley Kubrick) is evident in the zero-gravity sequences, where swirling cameras lovingly glide through spiral landscapes.

Eyes pre-conditioned by expectation see "sci-fi formulas" where the Zen no-mind witnesses the joy of cinematic experience. Whatever.

Quills

There's a sequence in Grant Morrison's comic series The Invisibles when the Marquis de Sade, aided by King Mob's cell, samples the Dionysian delights of 20th century civilization. Upon encountering an S&M club, Citizen Sade expresses his astonishment that conventional society now capitalizes on the very transgressions that led to Sade's imprisonment and posthumous notoriety.

Philip Kaufman's film Quills will hopefully rehabilitate Sade in the public eye. Doug Wright's screenplay (based on his theater play), and Geoffrey Wright's charismatic performance as Sade, counteract the stereotype of Sade as a sex-crazed criminal.

Quills is a multi-layered film, with a plot that has allegories about State censorship, the liberating power of Objective Art, and how our deepest obsessions can be transformed into meaningful experiences. Sade's flirtatious accomplice in crime, Madeleine (Kate Winslet), captures the process by which innocent love ("dove-like") is seduced into diabolical and voluptuous excesses.

Rogier Stoffer's cinematography and the lush production design by Martin Childs envelop the senses. Quills is a candidate for the year's most optimistic portrayal of Via Activa, the life-focused school of self-introspective inquiry.

Special Mention:

Battlefield Earth

In my teens I was given a copy of Battlefield Earth, a sprawling 820-page novel by L. Ron Hubbard, written in the "old school" tradition of E.E. "Doc" Smith. I didn't yet know about the scandals surround Scientology or Hubbard's cavalier lifestyle. The book was harmless fun: the most memorable sequence for me was when Johnny "Goodboy" Tyler broke into a Colorado missile silo and discovered the suppressed history of Earth.

The film adaptation, directed by Roger Christian, is the most expensive failed experiment in subliminal advertising for Scientology in cinematic history. John Travolta hits a career low as Terl, the Psychlo Chief of Security, and Barry Pepper doesn't measure up to Tyler's heroism in the book (Mel Gibson might have).