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Review by Susan Granger
½ star out of 4
There were two competitive Mars exploration pictures planned
for 2000: the dreadful "Mission to Mars" and "Red Planet." When the
first tanked at the box-office, the second looked more
promising. Wrong! This sci-fi story begins in 2050, when the Earth has
been polluted and six astronauts are sent to repair the Mars
Terraforming Project for colonization. But when Carrie-Anne Moss, as
the mission commander, gets them into orbit, problems occur and a
crash-landing leaves her five crewmen stranded without their high-tech
equipment. "This is what they told us about it high school," one
mutters, "the moment when algebra would save our lives!" Plus, a
malfunction in AMEE, their exploration robot, turns it into a
stalking, renegade adversary. "AMEE's gone mustang," reports Val
Kilmer, who serves as the ship's janitor. The perfunctory, contrived
script by Chuck Pfarrer and Jonathan Lemkin is filled with
techno-babble about malfunctioning equipment and why the terraforming
blue algae was scoured off the planet's surface. Director Antony
Hoffman flounders, staging stilted, superficial scenes, squandering
the talents of Moss, Kilmer, Terence Stamp, Tom Sizemore, Benjamin
Bratt and Simon Baker. A feeble attempt at humor occurs when the men
urinate and marvel, "You sure get a high arc in low gravity." So much
of this project's dramatic potential is squandered: there are no
Martians, only tiny, ravenous insects who, conveniently, keep their
distance most of the time. Carrie-Anne Moss converses primarily with a
computer named Lucille, and even her nude shower scene is a
bore. Finally, at the end, she's allowed to haul the hero out of
trouble and jump-start his heart. On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to
10, "Red Planet" is a pointless, fumbling 2. Is there a Mars curse?
Copyright © 2000 Susan Granger
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out of 4
