Reading about and watching Mission to Mars made me think of this movie, Red Planet. What was going on in the year 2000, where we needed two Mars movies about colonization and weird alien encounters on said planet?
Neither of these movies were successful, I remember talk of the town being that they were bad, but what can I say I still always sorta wanted to see the two movies. A year after this came out, there was also Ghosts of Mars, which was also hugely unsuccessful and is one of the last John Carpenter movies. We just could not stick the landing on these dumb Mars movies!
Red Planet stars Val Kilmer, Carrie Anne Moss, Tom Sizemore and Benjamin Bratt. It's a who's who of turn of the century actors. They're crack-shot astronauts, on a colonization mission to Mars, and once they get there, problems arise and they are running out of oxygen on the planet. About to die, Kilmer opens his helmet and discovers there's oxygen. This is just the start of the problems and the mysteries inherent to the planet, so let's see what happens next, eh?
What happens next is a "suspenseful" story of survival. Trapped on the planet with only a few options, they have to get from point A to B to C, they have to evade a kung fu robot(?) and there's internal conflict between the astronauts. They later discover life on Mars in the form of insects, as well as combat the various communication problems and the limited time they can be on the planet.
Overall, this is a averagely middling sci fi movie, and although it's not good, it can be entertaining at times. I guess. There's nothing special about it, and it relies on heavily cliched heroics and heavily stereotyped characters to do what you expect them to do. Nothing really happens worth mentioning, and were it not for the stupid robot that turns into a wolf-like killer, this would be a straight up drama. I don't remember the explanation for the robot thing, but I'm there was a throw away one line of dialogue about it.
Meh, it's a space movie, I guess. 1 star.
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