tieman64 "If the life of natural things, millions of years old, does not seem sacred to us, then what can be sacred? Human vanity alone? Contempt for the natural world is contempt for life." ― Edward Abbey A terrible science fiction film by director Antony Hoffman, "Red Planet" opens in the year 2056, with Earth facing an ecological crisis as a consequence of pollution and overpopulation. Hoping to start afresh on a new planet, humans begin seeding Mars with atmosphere-producing algae. Overseeing such operations is Kate Bowman (Carrie-Anne Moss), commander of a spaceship sent to monitor oxygen production on Mars. To her surprise, life has begun evolving on the once barren planet.There have been a number of science-fiction films set after an ecological collapse ("Silent Running", "Wall-E", "Lost in Space", "Interstellar", "Mad Max", "No Blade of Grass", "Pandorum", "Snowpiecer", "The Colony" etc). Like most of these films, though, "Red Planet" simply uses its premise to string together a collection of formulaic action sequences. We thus watch as crewmen go violently insane, are attacked by CGI creatures and robots, sacrificially die to save others and as various emergencies befall a spaceship. With a nod to Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey", the film also attempts to get philosophical, several characters tangentially discussing atheism and creationism. These conversations are trite and terribly written. By its climax, only actress Carrie-Anne Moss, whose character's name is itself a nod to Kubrick, has escaped with dignity. Beautifully sculpted by Darwin's hand, she's a more interesting piece of evolutionary synthesis than anything else in Hoffman's film. Val Kilmer co-stars.5/10 – Worth one viewing. See "Mission to Mars" and "Pandorum".

decibeldoctor What's dumber than a box full o'rocks?Apparently, a tincan full o'rocket scientists!Warning: major MULTIPLE SPOILERS alert! Seriously! A bunch of 'em!We'll gloss quickly over just a few of the many opening idiocies - that, in order to generate enough "atmosphere" to (momentarily) overcome the natural gravitational leakage of Mars, the algae would have to eat nothing but rock, cover the entire surface of the planet a foot deep and probably run through every drop of water in both polar ice caps in about a week; that this "air" would last about another week after the algae died; that the main spacecraft was so poorly designed and badly shielded, it couldn't handle being smacked into by a simple wave of solar radiation and maybe a few piddly micrometeorites; that their emergency so-called "landing" system was among the most moronic concepts NASA ever dismissed out-of-hand without a second thought - and move right on to the biggest bit of REALLY astounding stupidity....Okay, so they've crash-landed on Mars. They now have a trudge of unknown distance ahead of them, a severely limited air supply and a colleague with life-threatening injuries. (At this point in the script, they're not yet aware that the Habitat has already been trashed. More brainlessness - like simple telemetry couldn't have told them that before they even left Earth??) But, not to worry, they've also brought along a sophisticated piece of hardware which can probably save ALL their lives. The "AMEE" unit is entirely self-powered and self-propelled, can run at speeds approaching 50 clicks an hour and has servo motors clearly serious enough to carry a pretty hefty load, particularly under Martian gravity.Like, maybe, a wounded man in a spacesuit, for example...?But is this brain-trust (more like "brain-rust"!) smart enough to use it properly? Sadly, no. Not even their "engineer", Val Kilmer, thinks to simply say, "AMEE? Would you please run on ahead and find the Habitat, then come back and guide us to it while carrying Professor Ruptured-Spleen, here? Oh, and, while you're at it, please bring back some full air tanks and a water bottle or two. There's a good girl..."She was a "borrowed" military device. As clearly demonstrated later on in the storyline, a major part of her original design intent was, specifically, recon and intelligence-gathering - locating potentially hidden things in completely unfamiliar terrain - not to mention protection and support of her assigned "squad" of personnel. Her subroutines, especially as twitchy as they were after the crash and subsequent "rebooting" of her military protocols, would've been thrilled to pieces to be given a REAL mission! (...a whole 'nother folly, that any such inherently-dangerous and patently-USELESS-on-Mars software was left on her harddrive, simply "inhibited", not COMPLETELY WIPED, as any SENSIBLE engineer would've done before even allowing her aboard!)Instead, these geniuses sign their own death warrants by actively conspiring to waste some of the precious little time and oxygen they have left DESTROYING their "Ultimate Personal Assistant", just to get at her navigational subsystem, separately extracting her power supply, then improvising a connection between the two with clip leads or bare wires or spit-and-chewing-gum or something, so they can hand-carry the resulting half-assed armload of Rube-Goldberg'd junk across untold kilometers of Martian landscape.Excuse me?!?!? Seriously!?!?!?!? What the *bleep* kinda *bleep*ing sense does THAT *bleep*ing make????Oy, *bleep*ing vey!Personally, I'd MUCH prefer to simply FOLLOW said "navigational system" as it frolics on ahead of me, rather than screw it up with a screwdriver and lug it around myself. That's just dumber than TWO boxes of (Martian) rocks! "Suspension of disbelief"?!? I had to practically lynch mine and string it up to sit through the rest of this silly film. A plot with this many holes in it wouldn't even make a decent window screen - they're so HUGE you could sling a cat(-shaped rogue robot) through 'em!

chaos-rampant At its time, all those 13 years ago, the film probably went by on its, for the time, palatable effects on a big screen, decent cast not totally phoning it in and fairly simple story of Martian exploration. Watching it now is to get the sense that in another 13 years it will be looked back as amusedly as It - Terror from Outer Space or any number of those 'guys in a tin can pretend to fly in space' sci-fi films of the 50's.It's truly bad. The story is as silly now as it was then, the science and technology as ludicrous (a robot with ninja moves!), the performances as theatrical. But what really has sunk it, I think, is the handling of cinematic space.Films set in space only bring to the fore, with more clarity than usual films, cinematic space as the main anchor of a story-world. 2001 got right a set of notions about the gravity of things in space, the viewing gravity that creates immersion, so every extravagant thing down the road was rooted in our first having been transported to space. I'm eagerly anticipating Gravity as the new template in this field.Here everything feels phony.An unfortunate contrast with the closing theme, so to speak, which is how god, what we call god, is the willingness to not give up, on close ones and otherwise, and this willingness is nothing else than not losing track/sight of the presence of another human being in space, a matter of persisting vision. When the female captain in the end hurls herself from the main vessel, attached to merely a chord, to recover the sole unconscious survivor, this should have been a powerful moment to capture this commitment, had we been rooted as firmly as they are.

gtitus09 I thought it was an interesting enough movie or I wouldn't have bought it. It may not be a 4 star movie but it was at least worth 2 and 3/4 stars. Or a 7 out of 10. The only thing that troubled me is the scene where they've landed on Mars and finally made it to the base. They find it all torn apart. The thing I don't understand is how all of these intelligent men can see the pieces of material from the wreckage and that, MOVING BACK AND FORTH. Now. What is causing these pieces of material to move back and forth? Could it be um, hmm.. AIR? None of them seem to realize this and it's only by the time they have run out, inside the suits that Val Kilmer's character hits his visor accidentally, causing it to come up, and he realizes HE CAN BREATHE!I find it hard to believe that I've never seen this mentioned not one time before, and could not find it at this website in the Goofs either.However all that aside I thought the film interesting enough, with good performances from Moss and Kilmer and most of the other actors.