Salocin

Red Planet

Against my better judgement, and the judgement of pretty much everyone I know, and despite the absolutely horrible experience I had with Mission to Mars, I decided to rent this and see just how bad it was. It turns out that my chronically low expectations actually prepared me for the movie, and I managed to enjoy it a little.

Red Planet is set in the not-too-distant future, when the wise leaders of a seemingly peaceful planet earth have finally come to terms with the fact that they've well and truly messed up the ecosystem. Never mind water shortages, there's oxygen shortages. The overpopulation problem has developed just like we predicted and the planet has reached breaking point. So scientists set about terraforming Mars (by exploding nuclear weapons at the poles and smothering the planet in alien algae - good start).

Suddenly, the oxygen levels on Mars start to drop, and a team is sent to find out what happened. The initial voiceover narration is cheap scriptwriting at its best as the writer (Chuck Pfarrer, who also wrote Hard Target, Barb Wire (a shameless and abysmal Casablanca rip-off) and The Jackal) tries to get around the introductions and backstory as quickly as possible so as to get to the special effects and the action. The crew are introduced by their Commander, Kate Bowman, played by Carrie-Anne Moss and indelicately slotted into character boxes that all but spell out who is going to die, who the love interest will be, and who will metamorphose into a jerk with an attitude problem by half time.

Fast forward to the arrival on Mars, cue the predictable disaster that awaits them the second they reach orbit. Knock out pretty much anything remotely technologically useful including their communications, habitat, guidance system, air supply, space ship, and landing craft, and turn their friendly pet robot into a murderous commando quadruple-jointed pooch from hell. Throw in some machismo and a whiff of cabin fever, and you're all set to film the remainder of the movie in some remote corner of Australia (and a bit in Jordan), with a red filter attached to the lens, thus radically cutting down on your production costs, which makes you wonder what they blew the rest of the $75MM budget on.

The film makes some un-followed-up-on connections between faith and science, plays God with the laws of physics, and the continuity people were clearly sleeping on the job, but all that nit-picking aside, the movie is quite watchable. The pace is maintained reasonably consistently and there are sufficient known threats and believable deadlines that we are at all times expecting the next bad thing to come along. Meanwhile, the movie avoids the catastrophic pitfalls that Mission to Mars catastrophically encountered, such as the reliance upon a single unbelievable plot point to the extent that the entire film is just packaging, or the creation of characters so shallow they seem to be mere cardboard cut-outs - not that there's much depth to the characters here, but when you compare them to Mission..., you have to give credit where its due.

Should you watch this? Probably not - I'm a fan of Space Operas, and keep hoping that someone will come up with a film that comes close to doing justice to the literary works of Iain M. Banks or Alastair Reynolds, and as such I continually throw myself at these movies despite their reviews in the mistaken belief that perhaps others simply don't have the same tastes as I have. In fact, they're mediocre at best (Red Planet), and marketing-driven excrement on average (Mission to Mars).