Red Planet (2000)

The greatest movie ever made..!

not as good as all the hype

The movie is wonderful and true, an act of love in all its contradictions and complexity

Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.

The second of the Mars based box office bombs released in 2000, Red Planet is maybe - just maybe - worth a revisit by some who were irritated by it back on first viewing. Once knowing that this is not going to be some action packed alien movie, that it's a survivalist drama that tips its hat to 1950s sci-fi schlock, that cares about its characters, then there's a decent popcorner experience to be had here. This is not to say it's a genius entry in the sci-fi pantheon, because it's not, the same problems still exist; Terence Stamp is woefully under used (seriously they could have got any low paid character actor to play his role), some things either don't make sense or are left unanswered, and of course it still drags in the middle as the boys chatter away on Mars whilst Carrie Anne-Moss is up at base station fretting and suffering erectus nippleus.Yet there's fun to be had here, some nutty science marries up with nice photography and splendid set design, and the makers know what sort of picture they want to make. Where Mission to Mars sunk under the weight of its own pretensions - trying to go all elegiac and important, Red Planet nudges and winks and asks you along for the ride. So get on board and take it for what it is, a pretentious free zone with good human drama at the core. 6.5/10

"If the life of natural things, millions of years old, does not seem sacred to us, then what can be sacred? Human vanity alone? Contempt for the natural world is contempt for life." ― Edward Abbey A terrible science fiction film by director Antony Hoffman, "Red Planet" opens in the year 2056, with Earth facing an ecological crisis as a consequence of pollution and overpopulation. Hoping to start afresh on a new planet, humans begin seeding Mars with atmosphere-producing algae. Overseeing such operations is Kate Bowman (Carrie-Anne Moss), commander of a spaceship sent to monitor oxygen production on Mars. To her surprise, life has begun evolving on the once barren planet.There have been a number of science-fiction films set after an ecological collapse ("Silent Running", "Wall-E", "Lost in Space", "Interstellar", "Mad Max", "No Blade of Grass", "Pandorum", "Snowpiecer", "The Colony" etc). Like most of these films, though, "Red Planet" simply uses its premise to string together a collection of formulaic action sequences. We thus watch as crewmen go violently insane, are attacked by CGI creatures and robots, sacrificially die to save others and as various emergencies befall a spaceship. With a nod to Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey", the film also attempts to get philosophical, several characters tangentially discussing atheism and creationism. These conversations are trite and terribly written. By its climax, only actress Carrie-Anne Moss, whose character's name is itself a nod to Kubrick, has escaped with dignity. Beautifully sculpted by Darwin's hand, she's a more interesting piece of evolutionary synthesis than anything else in Hoffman's film. Val Kilmer co-stars.5/10 – Worth one viewing. See "Mission to Mars" and "Pandorum".

It's not a bad science film but it's not a good one either. I liked to a degree - for the entertainment value. I think it's good for a one time watch if you like science fiction movies.********* Spoiler *********** It's a predictable movie - a group of scientists on a desolate planet (Mars) and they have a sentient robot with them AMEE. Something will have to happen to cause drama and action with the isolated group and what better to be the enemy than their own AMEE that turns on them. To add more to a space drama you will need to have something to go wrong - in the case of this film it's the oxygen running out.***************************** In spite of the predictability of the movie it is a good watch for those who have not seen the film. It is entertaining.6.5/10

What's dumber than a box full o'rocks?Apparently, a tincan full o'rocket scientists!Warning: major MULTIPLE SPOILERS alert! Seriously! A bunch of 'em!We'll gloss quickly over just a few of the many opening idiocies - that, in order to generate enough "atmosphere" to (momentarily) overcome the natural gravitational leakage of Mars, the algae would have to eat nothing but rock, cover the entire surface of the planet a foot deep and probably run through every drop of water in both polar ice caps in about a week; that this "air" would last about another week after the algae died; that the main spacecraft was so poorly designed and badly shielded, it couldn't handle being smacked into by a simple wave of solar radiation and maybe a few piddly micrometeorites; that their emergency so-called "landing" system was among the most moronic concepts NASA ever dismissed out-of-hand without a second thought - and move right on to the biggest bit of REALLY astounding stupidity....Okay, so they've crash-landed on Mars. They now have a trudge of unknown distance ahead of them, a severely limited air supply and a colleague with life-threatening injuries. (At this point in the script, they're not yet aware that the Habitat has already been trashed. More brainlessness - like simple telemetry couldn't have told them that before they even left Earth??) But, not to worry, they've also brought along a sophisticated piece of hardware which can probably save ALL their lives. The "AMEE" unit is entirely self-powered and self-propelled, can run at speeds approaching 50 clicks an hour and has servo motors clearly serious enough to carry a pretty hefty load, particularly under Martian gravity.Like, maybe, a wounded man in a spacesuit, for example...?But is this brain-trust (more like "brain-rust"!) smart enough to use it properly? Sadly, no. Not even their "engineer", Val Kilmer, thinks to simply say, "AMEE? Would you please run on ahead and find the Habitat, then come back and guide us to it while carrying Professor Ruptured-Spleen, here? Oh, and, while you're at it, please bring back some full air tanks and a water bottle or two. There's a good girl..."She was a "borrowed" military device. As clearly demonstrated later on in the storyline, a major part of her original design intent was, specifically, recon and intelligence-gathering - locating potentially hidden things in completely unfamiliar terrain - not to mention protection and support of her assigned "squad" of personnel. Her subroutines, especially as twitchy as they were after the crash and subsequent "rebooting" of her military protocols, would've been thrilled to pieces to be given a REAL mission! (...a whole 'nother folly, that any such inherently-dangerous and patently-USELESS-on-Mars software was left on her harddrive, simply "inhibited", not COMPLETELY WIPED, as any SENSIBLE engineer would've done before even allowing her aboard!)Instead, these geniuses sign their own death warrants by actively conspiring to waste some of the precious little time and oxygen they have left DESTROYING their "Ultimate Personal Assistant", just to get at her navigational subsystem, separately extracting her power supply, then improvising a connection between the two with clip leads or bare wires or spit-and-chewing-gum or something, so they can hand-carry the resulting half-assed armload of Rube-Goldberg'd junk across untold kilometers of Martian landscape.Excuse me?!?!? Seriously!?!?!?!? What the *bleep* kinda *bleep*ing sense does THAT *bleep*ing make????Oy, *bleep*ing vey!Personally, I'd MUCH prefer to simply FOLLOW said "navigational system" as it frolics on ahead of me, rather than screw it up with a screwdriver and lug it around myself. That's just dumber than TWO boxes of (Martian) rocks! "Suspension of disbelief"?!? I had to practically lynch mine and string it up to sit through the rest of this silly film. A plot with this many holes in it wouldn't even make a decent window screen - they're so HUGE you could sling a cat(-shaped rogue robot) through 'em!