

RED PLANET
                    A film review by Christopher Null
                      Copyright 2000 filmcritic.com
                             filmcritic.com

     One approaches the release of Red Planet with a singular, desperate
thought:  There is no way... it is not possible... it is
inconceivable... that Red Planet could be worse than Mission to Mars.

     Indeed, Red Planet makes for a far better film than Mission to
Mars.  While that's not saying a whole lot (since Mission currently
ranks as the worst movie I've seen all year) Red Planet is at least
competently constructed and mildly engaging, so long as you put aside
the sappy melodramatics.  Of course, this isn't that easy to do.

     A narrated prologue by Carrie-Anne Moss's Commander Kate Bowman
clues us in to some of what's ahead through its drippy introductions of
the setting and the cast.  By 2025 we've apparently destroyed the earth,
so we're getting ready to move to Mars thanks to a terraforming project
that has oxygenated the atmosphere.  Unfortunately, something seems
amiss: the sensors have vanished, and the algae they put up there seems
to have gone away.  To find out what gives, our last best hope -- a
human crew -- is sent to the planet to discover what went wrong.  And,
while 2025 is not an eco-friendly era, it is an equal-opportunity one,
and the buxom Bowman is in charge.

     Along for the ride are a rogues gallery of characters -- notably
Val Kilmer (surprisingly tame here) as the ship's mechanic and Tom
Sizemore (surprisingly lacking dialogue) as the chief scientific officer
onboard.  And then there's AMEE, a robotic CGI dog (very well-done, I
must add) ostensibly with some kind of navigation job... despite its
legacy of military programming that fundamentally makes it a deadly
weapon.  (A better recipe for trouble I can't imagine.)

     The discovery mission is soon underway, but, well, do movie space
missions ever turn out very well?  Before you know it, we're in
MacGyver-esque search-and-rescue mode after a fire hits the ship, and
most of the crew is stranded on the surface with the now-crazed robot
dog.  At this point the film unfortunately degenerates into any number
of recent space cinema entries -- take your pick from Lost in Space,
Mission to Mars, Apollo 13, or Pitch Black (though some of these are
better movies than others).  All the while we are meant to wonder, what
happened to the algae on Mars?  (Now there's something that'll get a
PG-13 audience on the edge of its seat!)

     Once we've made it this far, the movie really starts to bog down. 
Red Planet's plot holes come at you at a dizzying pace, and they can be
rather extreme.  To wit: Why isn't the off-screen murder of one
character simply heard over the other characters' headset radios?  How
does a homemade solar radio work in the dark?  How do you get sparks in
space from smashing metal?  The answers to these questions and more are
not forthcoming.

     On top of this, the weird cosmo-metaphysics espoused by Terence
Stamp's grandpa-like character ("the soul of the ship") don't make the
movie any better.  Instead, it comes across as an attempt to be like
2001: A Space Odyssey, somehow implying a greater force beyond mankind
imploring us to care for the world we have.  It comes as no small irony
that Stamp's is the first character that is gotten rid of.

     But putting the silly-talk aside, in its quest to show off its
obviously-not-really-Martian landscapes, Red Planet unfortunately misses
a big lesson that 2001 proved so very well:  Getting there can be all
the fun.  Next time Hollywood decides to take a trip in space, let's
hope they take it slow.

RATING:  **1/2

|------------------------------|
 \ ***** Perfection             \
  \ **** Good, memorable film    \
   \ *** Average, hits and misses \
    \ ** Sub-par on many levels    \
     \ * Unquestionably awful       \
      |------------------------------|

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Director: Antony Hoffman
Producer: Bruce Berman, Mark Canton, Jorge Saralegui
Writer: Jonathan Lemkin, Channing Gibson
Starring: Val Kilmer, Tom Sizemore, Carrie-Anne Moss, Benjamin Bratt,
Simon Baker, Terence Stamp

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