The year is 2005. After months in interplanetary flight, the manned spacecraft Destiny prepares for the final two hours before separation of the landing module, and its flight to the surface of the Red Planet. The news agency GNN (Global News Network) covers these last two hours before the historic touchdown, using state-of-the-art technology, and even a correspondent aboard Destiny itself. However, powers are at work that aims at stopping the historic landing, and bring utter chaos back home. All we can do, is watch the show...
Journey to Mars is a great TV-movie, even though it has quite a few scientific errors (as how they conquered the speed of light - which is necessary to send instant transmition from Earth to Mars - which takes 4 hours each way with today's radio-technology - maybe they use some kind of Tachyon-beams?), but if you are willing to forgive these errors, you may find this quite a good movie - certainly something out of the ordinary.
The film is made as GNN's live coverage of the historic landing, and like the hit-series "24", events occur in real-time. They succeeded admirably in making it look like we really were watching a special, braking-news report of CNN (or in the case of the movie, GNN), and the atmosphere really feels as such, which makes the movie even more interesting.
The plot evolves a lot over the course of the movie, and takes quite some unexpected turns, in the end you'll be sitting glued to the screen as Destiny zooms over the Martian surface - it really feels as if it's actually happening for real!
The acting is generally quite good, near perfect at times, but the atmosphere is what really makes this film something really special, as it builds up over time.
The last few minutes are arguably the best and most atmospheric moments you'll ever experience in a TV movie like this, so I wont ruin them for you, but just suffice to say they are well above excellent.
The special effects really aren't so important in this kind of movie, but they are still quite well done. Although you may loose hope after seeing the opening zoom-over of the Martian surface (which is taken from a NASA animation by the looks of it), the effects gets a whole LOT better over time.
So, as I overall liked this movie because of good plot and atmosphere, and also because of mostly good acting, I give it a final score of 8/10.
