Red Planet

IMDB
First time viewed: No
Current Release: No
Watched With: Myself

What a crap trailer.

I don't know what prompted this viewing. There was a bunch of space set movies late 90's early 00's when CG was becoming a little cheaper and easier. Some of them were great, some not so much. But there hasn't been a team-of-astronauts-space-action-drama that I can remember since Danny Boyle's Sunshine in 2007. I do like them.

I also remember this came out very close to the time when Mission to Mars came out. Did it even get a cinema release? Can anyone clarify that? Whatever the case, Mission to Mars was the big film and this got shoved to the side. It's certainly much less grand in scope and less lofty in ideas than that film, it's also a little more fun.

I recently looked at a list of top 50 movie robots. I definitely would have made room somewhere for Amee, she is badass even though she's really haphazardly shoved into the film for no reason. I love the whole mystery of what happened on Mars, and the small group of people trying to survive stranded on a planet. These are things I inherently love.

The film has a great cast, I really love Carrie-Anne Moss in this, I don't know why but it could be that she's always so cool and level-headed, even during the craziest circumstances. She's the kind of person you want to lead a team for this.

The film looks and sounds great, The effects hold up surprisingly well on my dvd. The Mars photography is beautiful. I believe they shot in Australia somewhere. Works well. I love the production design and the cool little gadgets and stuff they have. Graeme Revell's score is pretty good. He scored Pitch Black that same year, some striking similarities in films (stranded survivors on a desert planet shot in Australia) AND score(why so much tabla in space?), but Pitch Black is vastly superior.

Really where this film is let down is the script. I can see in the deleted scenes a lot of the character development in the beginning got thrown out, rightfully so I think. It establishes them fine what it doesn't do is develop them in any way. The conflict between the survivors seems heavy handed. Also once they are stranded there's not much they can do. Sometimes that can be great, but here it's not that interesting. I guess that's why they felt the need to thrown in a rogue military robot hunting them.

It's a really shame though, everything else about this film really works. With a few more re-writes this could have been fantastic. As it is, it's just alright.