Red Planet

Why can’t anyone make a good Mars movie any more? Maybe Mars just isn’t that interesting, and movie makers should stop obsessing about it. Hard on the heels of the knuckleheaded “Mission to Mars” comes the only marginally better “Red Planet,” meaning that once again a spaceship traveling to Mars runs into trouble. Unfortunately the two pictures share more in common than would be good for either of them. As an anemic voiceover narration informs us at the outset, in the future, Earth has become so polluted that a desperate mankind looks for better living space on Mars. In order to make this feasible, scientists have sent some algae up there by rocket in order to produce oxygen and make the planet habitable. Things went swimmingly at first, but then mysteriously, all the oxygen vanished. Gee, why?

So our intrepid crew, led by the sexy Commander Bowman (Moss), has to go on a very long trip to find out. Alas, catastrophe strikes, leading to terrible difficulties for the photogenic space travelers. I am no rocket scientist, but it seems to me that the spaceships in these movies keep running into exactly the sort of problems that one might expect in the deep reaches of space. In fact, nobody seems particularly surprised by these events, and yet there seems to be precious little planning about what to do when they occur. After their ship is disabled, the “Red Planet” crew has to make one agonizing choice after another. The five men descend to the planet surface, while the noble Bowman stays in the orbiting ship, where she might--oh my gosh--die. (Is there some hidden sexist subtext here? The men go out to hunt and gather, and the woman stays home and takes care of the house.) While the men play “Survivor” below, Bowman tries valiantly to repair her ship. She mucks about under the hood, as it were, but this kind of switch-flipping is by now standard boilerplate for science fiction and can hardly be called innovative.

I’ll allow you to guess whether she succeeds in restoring the life support systems or not, but let’s just say that the story doesn’t end at this point. Meanwhile, the men on the planet are startled to find that, amazingly, there is oxygen on Mars after all (all prior information notwithstanding), and the crew spends the rest of the picture trying to solve this and other mysteries (which, by the way, they really do not). And oh yeah, they also have to find a way to get back to their ship before they starve to death. I suppose you have to give at least a little credit to any movie that tries to kill off all of its main characters within the first thirty minutes, but that really isn’t enough to rescue “Red Planet” from the slag heap of poorly written, woodenly acted, and not terribly logical space operas. The movie falls prey to the same ailment that afflicted its older and slightly dumber sibling. Namely, they spend too much time on a lot of nifty-looking hardware, and not nearly enough on interesting characters or an intelligent story. Chief among the hardware is a robot called AMEE, which looks like a cross between the Terminator and a giant spider.

It’s shiny and metal and lethal, and nobody in the theater is the least bit surprised when it turns hostile and starts hunting down the stranded crew members. You probably could have made several smaller movies for what it cost to create this robot antagonist, who emotes at least as well as the humans (they blatantly cheat here, by the way, affording AMEE a growl-like noise that no human would ever program into a machine). As the cardboard characters are killed off one by one, they discover something on Mars that is worrisome, lethal, and completely irrelevant. They promptly put this discovery in a bottle with the intention of taking it home. Is this a good idea? No. Is it too much to ask for a movie to make sense? Apparently. Our heroes find a fifty-year-old Russian rocket on the surface which is so archaic that nobody knows how to operate it, but which links up effortlessly to the crew's computers. This is pretty hard to accept, given that in real life we’re lucky if we can use last year’s version of Windows.

The movie is full of this kind of self-serving plotting, which is shorthand for “we can't be bothered writing a script that makes sense.” Val Kilmer, as Gallagher, has obviously been studying at the Keanu Reeves school of bad acting. He manages to survive long enough to hook up with sort-of love interest Bowman, which makes him the closest thing to a hero the movie has. The reliable Tom Sizemore almost manages to breathe some life into his role, but Benjamin Bratt doesn’t do much except flash his cheekbones until he is unceremoniously dumped from the story. Terence Stamp, on hand to add a bit a British seasoning, dies early on, but not before imparting a bit of spiritual wisdom to the rest of the crew, which is remembered later in one of the many stretches of unconvincing dialogue cobbled together between blue screen effects. Whatever suspense “Red Planet” manages to generate in the early sequences drizzles away during its tired “and then there were none” middle section. The movie deteriorates into standard issue sci-fi thriller mode, without becoming very thrilling. In fairness, the picture is visually effective, with outstanding set and production design, and strong cinematography. I am not sure where they filmed it, but it does look like I would expect Mars to look. It also offers some reasonably good special effects (AMEE is nicely rendered, if dramatically nonsensical), but these days that’s the least we can expect, and it’s not enough. You can get good special effects on TV any day of the week, so a trip to the theater should offer something more. “Red Planet” doesn't. It’s enough to confirm your suspicion that man should never go to Mars, in real life or the movies. (11/16/00)