Humdrum space adventure that makes the other Mars movie of its year Mission To Mars seem like Shakespeare. Val Kilmer leads an impressive but wasted cast as a member of a group of cosmonauts in the year 2057 who embark on a mission to the red planet to find out what exactly happened to a backfired atmospheric reorganizing project initiated by terraformers twenty years prior. A few of the usual pitfalls ensue: power failures, lack of natural resources and everything getting saved in the nick of time before the clock counts to zero, but apart from that, there's not really all that much that happens. How can you possibly make a multi-million dollar film about five people on Mars and still manage to have them do nothing but sit around? Even the deaths of the various lesser members of the cast seem incidental and happenstance more than integral parts of a scary story. If the characters were being explored in even the most meager of fashions perhaps the mellowness of it all would be more forgivable, but as it seems that all the actors are just posing for the cameras until their agents can get their hands on some better quality scripts there's really not much to do except bear it with them. Val Kilmer does a hackneyed job of his character, at once putting on a ridiculous voice to signify that he's a high school geek but at the same time building his musculature up (and then saying somewhere in the film that he's not a jock; WHATEVER!) and spray-painting his hair a Euroclub blonde. A subplot about a robot that goes haywire tries to preach about the dangers of giving morality to artificial intelligence, but as the machine is injured in a fall (instead of actually choosing to go bad) this also begins to be more of an excuse to kill time instead of teach anybody a lesson. Even if Mission To Mars' plot outcome was the most ridiculously inane thing to happen in a movie all year, at least something happened in it. The filmmakers also committed the dire sin of casting ultracool action babe Carrie-Anne Moss as the commander of the spaceship and then leaving her trapped in a room for the ENTIRE film!! WHHAAAT? One gets the impression the film would actually have been interesting had she been allowed to get down onto the red earth and be among the people. Oh well, better luck next time.
Review of Red Planet
