BEFORE: Another example of two similar films being released at roughly the same time - here's the other film from 2000 about a manned mission to Mars. Linking tonight comes courtesy of "Top Gun", which featured both Tim Robbins from "Mission to Mars" and Val Kilmer (last seen in "Thunderheart") from tonight's film.
I've been waiting for a good (no commercials) airing of this film on cable, but no luck. So I'm renting it from iTunes, and I'll have to grab it off of cable and put in on DVD at a later date.
THE PLOT: Astronauts search for solutions to save a dying Earth by searching on Mars, only to have the mission go terribly awry.
AFTER: This film had to walk sort of a thin line, since after getting its crew to Mars, they've got to struggle to get home, despite things going wrong. I don't think I'm giving anything away by saying that things went wrong, I mean, if you watched a whole movie about a space mission where everything worked exactly as planned, how boring would that be?
But just like in "Due Date", the film keeps throwing obstacles in the path of the astronauts who are trying to make it back. If the situations are too easily overcome, we won't feel like they accomplished much, but if the situations are impossible, we won't get to see them succeed. Unless the situations are impossible and they succeed anyhow, which can feel like the solutions were contrived. I think that's what happened a few times during this film.
An extension of the "always darkest before the dawn" situation, which should only occur once during a film, but here it feels like it's hard-wired right into the entire picture. Just when you think things can't get any worse, they do, so it's back to the drawing board to figure out the best way to get where they need to be, and hopefully get off the planet.
In a similar vein, there are two schools of thought when it comes to special effects. One notion says that they should be used to create any kind of fantastical situation one can imagine, from aliens to robots - the things that we don't have in real life. The other plan is to use effects to recreate real-world situations, but one that would be difficult to film, like extreme weather conditions, or the surface of another planet. At its best, this 2nd type of effects is essentially invisible - only the film geeks among us might look at a spaceship and wonder whether it's a model, or a live-scale constructed set, or entirely made of pixels.
This film has both kinds of special effects - the less noticable "background" effects, depicting the surface of another planet and its conditions, and the more prominent "foreground" ones, like the Rover/robot character. Not quite as blatant as, say, the liquid metal robot from "Terminator", but fairly close. So it comes off as a bit of a mixed bag for me.
I can believe, however, that humans would use up all the resources on Earth and start looking for the next closest semi-habitable planet to colonize. The only thing in question is probably the timetable - can we get off this rock before the ecological tipping point? And if our descendants can get to Mars, will their descendants someday have to figure out a way to colonize Jupiter?
NITPICK POINT: If modern science can make Mars hospitable, why can't it fix Earth's environment? For that matter, why aren't we working on fixing the goddamn hole in the ozone layer? Haven't we known about it for some time now? C'mon, less talk, more action - somebody just send a rocket up there with some more ozone, right?
Also starring Carrie-Anne Moss (last seen in "The Matrix Revolutions"), Tom Sizemore (last seen in "Born on the Fourth of July"), Benjamin Bratt (last heard in "Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs"), Simon Baker, Terence Stamp (last seen in "Legal Eagles").
RATING: 5 out of 10 solar flares
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