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| Movies,
Jerry Carpenter,
15 January 2001 |
Rating: F1
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I ran into this five minutes late, and by the end of the film I wish I’d been hit by a bus on the way to the cinema. Well, that’s a bit extreme perhaps, but there’s no denying that ‘Red Planet’ is the one of the dullest two hours available this year. It’s become a bit of a Hollywood thing to annually put out two films around the same subject matter, and for one of them to bad, and the other to be good - two earth threatening comet films in 98, two big haunted house films in 99. We’ve already had De Palma’s ‘Mission to Mars’ earlier this year, and it sucked royally – ‘The Abyss’ reset on Mars with a excitement bypass. So I’d hoped this would be a cheaper, more fun stab at the theme, but it’s actually more turgidly paced and uncompelling.
A group of astronauts are sent on a desperate mission to save the Earth from an ecological disaster. This hand-picked crew of totally one dimensional humans ( one-dimensional in the bad, boring post ‘Alien’ blue collar way ) come a cropper when their ship gets hit by a big glowing special effect. The guys have to crash land on the planet leaving the handsome lady from ‘The Matrix’ onboard desperately flicking switches in orbit. From there on it becomes a slow, slow, race for survival amongst the nice Martian landscapes, with the added bonus that the boys are being stalked by their own malfunctioning-therefore-insane AIBO.
The big problems, then. The slow pacing is a pain of course, although that didn’t hamper sci-fi uber-slogs like ‘2001’ and ‘Solaris’, but here it makes you start fidgeting with your Snickers wrapper. The human drama is all over the place, and you quickly identify the order of termination of each character in the script, which is annoying because you know Val Kilmer is going to make it, yet he’s the one you want smashed flat by a comet first. What hurts most, post viewing, is the feeling that there’s been so much effort put into the building of this film, and it’s all flashed in front of you to absolutely no effect because the script and editing are urine-poor. Maybe Mars is really only fun when it’s Attacking.
UK rating:
15
US rating:
PG
Antony Hoffman 2000 US
Val Kilmer, Benjamin Bratt, Carrie-Anne Moss, Simon Baker, Tom Sizemore
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