Overall Rating
  Awesome: 2.78%
Worth A Look: 11.11%
Average: 20.37%
Pretty Bad: 41.67%
Total Crap: 24.07%
11 reviews, 42 user ratings
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| Red Planet |
by Greg Muskewitz
"Dull inhabitants. Dull all around."
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And here we go again…lights, camera, ignition, blast-off! Cinema returns to one of its favorite places, one that science can dismantle the validity of the plot within minutes: outer space. With the inclusion of Red Planet, that adds yet another tack on the tally this year along with Supernova, Pitch Black, Mission to Mars, Battlefield Earth, Titan A.E., and Space Cowboys. But the only real competition here is Mission to Mars. (Supernova and Pitch Black dealt with aliens they encountered on another planet or in outer space. Battlefield and Titan covered the destruction and ruling of Earth by another life form, and Space Cowboys just shot a bunch of geriatrics up to fix a satellite.)If you ask me, Mission to Mars did pretty well on its own, while this claims to be “The first manned mission to Mars,” in 2057. (Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t M2M take places in the 2020s?) A crew of six (Val Kilmer, Tom Sizemore, Terence Stamp, Benjamin Bratt, Simon Baker, and mission commander Carrie-Anne Moss –notice it’s a group of caucasians only?) are on their way to investigate what went wrong with the “Mars Terraforming Project,” in that they sent algae to Mars to grow and create oxygen, so the dying Earth can be replaced.
Immediately something goes wrong, which sort of strands them. They have to take direct action, so all but Moss head for the base on the planet. Upon a rough landing (even less funny as a scene as it is a surprise), Stamp suffers a ruptured spleen. They would hoof him, but they only have seven hours of oxygen left and must get to the base. Then Baker and Bratt get in a fight, where Baker pushes him off of a cliff. Since no one else saw it, let’s pretend it was an accident! Then along comes AMEE, their military mapping and exploration robot, which has gone into kill mode. As with most movies of this genre, it becomes “Survivor” in outer space.
You might be surprised to know that beyond some bugs that eat the algae, produce C0-2 and crack like fireworks when lit on fire, there are no aliens. The screenwriters, Chuck Pfarrer and Jonathan Lemkin create their own convenient logic and resources such as the evidence of breathable air on Mars. It isn’t half the mystery it is to us as it is to the crew. (“How can there be oxygen here?”/ “Hmm, it must be those damned clever screenwriters throwing us a curved ball!”) The characters are so badly shaped and undeveloped into stereotypes that the movie happily points out as the female kick-ass hottie leader, the hunkie janitor who will save the day…and Earth, “the billionaire scientist who’s a legend only to himself,” the replacement, “the hothead,” and the old man who was bored by science’s inability “to answer the interesting questions, so I turned to philosophy.” Pfarrer and Lemkin do nothing to even try and add a human element to these characters. They’re all lame and hokey. Even the spastic, 180-degree differences of personality of those on “Survivor,” are more desirable than the generic sketches we have here.
The only exposition director Antony Hoffman provides is that this is a big-budget movie that will try to razzle-dazzle you with all of their CGI effects. Effects like these are no longer impressive. It just seems like a big waste of money, especially when they look as fake, or computer animated (versus the realism that was created with the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park) as they do here. The placement of visual effects is not a substitute for a decent story. And despite some brief tension during the last 10 or 15 minutes, this fails to lift this beyond mediocre. Beyond the valley of tread. Beyond boredom with the point of cynosure. Mission to Mars at least tried to prophesize some mythos of its own, but again, it took a more interested approach, a lesser-charted approach, than this unrecycled kitsch.Final Verdict: C-.
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link directly to this review at http://efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=4304&reviewer=172
originally posted: 11/11/00 11:48:20
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USA
10-Nov-2000 (PG-13)
DVD: 27-Mar-2001
UK
N/A
Australia
07-Dec-2000 (M)
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