It's 2025 and we're taking the necessary steps to colonize Mars. This is the installation on Red Planeta sci-fi film that's now 25 years old and manages to evoke a touch of optimism despite being set on an Earth that's becoming uninhabitable. At least in this movie, colonizing Mars is a feasible project and not a future trillionaire's ketamine dream. It wasn't the only 2000 film to go to Mars. Earlier this year Brian De Palma made what would become his last big-budget studio production with Mission to Marswhich takes place in the less dire circumstances of 2020, which the film believes takes place in 2020. Together they made a little more money worldwide than Space Cowboys – and without Clint Eastwood's signature thriftiness. Even at their best, these projects explain why Mars became such a forbidden territory in cinema in subsequent decades.
Mars remains out of reach for a manned mission, let alone actual colonization, but has been seen for years as a natural next step in imagined space travel. Mission to Mars and especially Red Planet Let's go back to the 1950s, when many science fiction films featured missions to Mars going awry and astronauts encountering various creatures or hidden civilizations. Both 2000 films open with such earnest imitations of clumsy science fiction from another era that they threaten to immediately turn off audiences: Mission to Mars introduces several of his characters in a barbecue scene (admittedly well choreographed by De Palma) full of cornball dialogue, and Red Planet begins with Commander Kate Bowman's (Carrie-Anne Moss) narration, which reads with such uncanny robotic rigidity that it sounds like a computer program.
Luckily, the voiceover doesn't last long. After mission director Bowman awkwardly introduces his team (played by Val Kilmer, Tom Sizemore, Benjamin Bratt, Simon Baker and Terence Stamp) and their primary mission to investigate why the terraforming process started by atmosphere-creating algae seems to have stalled, the film falls into familiar but well-visualized logistical problems from space movies. When the larger ship is damaged, Bowman must keep it in orbit and send the rest to Mars in a landing craft, which is then damaged. More complications: the main ship will fall from Mars orbit in 31 hours, the base on the surface of Mars is destroyed, communication between the ship and the surface will be interrupted at first.
Sometimes outwardly similar films released in the same year are fundamentally different in practice (see. Ant And Life of a Bug). This is not the case with the 2000 Mars films; Mission to Mars It also follows a horrific accident that disables a ship orbiting Mars and causes potentially deadly chaos as the crew attempts to land under less than ideal circumstances. In a stunning extended sequence from master stylist De Palma, the ship is hit by a meteor storm, forcing the astronauts to abandon it for a smaller resupply module on the planet's surface. De Palma's fluid, gravity-defying cinematography surpasses anything Red Planetbut one day Mission actually arrives on Mars, he begins to engage in wacky chatter about the secret origins of life. (The intended emotional climax basically involves seeing the characters in a futuristic PowerPoint.)
Should the film's revelations be called particularly implausible given that it is a sci-fi adventure film set in the then-future? Of course not. But Mars occupies a strange middle ground: it is a planet that people on Earth can see with the naked eye on some nights, and about which we have learned a lot over the past half-century. It's still distant enough to hold some (literally) otherworldly mystery, but the idea of ​​Mars holding universe-altering secrets seems outdated—somehow less intuitively plausible than, say, the much more outlandish (and also somewhat strange) premises Interstellar.
On these terms Red Planet is the more grounded of the two Mars 2000 films. But it's still easy to see why its retro charm would appeal more to sci-fi fans than to the general public, who may not have been looking for a middle ground between the realism of space thrillers. Apollo 13 and the craziest alien technology from Star Wars or independence Day. Even audiences may have been yearning for something more overtly cool, given the presence of Moss, one of the leads in the then-recent film. Matrix phenomenon.
Admittedly, when Red Planet really gets into more fantastical territory in the final half hour, it fails to build any genuine tension. It's too clear which characters are expendable (that is, most of them). But before that, it's a thoroughly fun survival thriller. Red Planet features compelling performances from Moss and Kilmer; the basic level of craftsmanship of a large studio in terms of lighting, cinematography and set design; and some neat touches from sci-fi magazines, such as a possibly nefarious robot and strange Martian lifeforms. Director Anthony Hoffman captures striking scenery and keeps everything at a pace appropriate for a film that might have played out like the brisk half of a double feature a half-century ago.
Red Planet was Hoffman's only specialty, and it seems a little unfair that he took the blame for it financial failure. After all, Mars failures continued after 2000. John Carpenter Ghosts of Mars now he has a cult following most of Carpenter's films do, but in the summer of 2001 it was a bombshell and was criticized. Mars needs mothers And John Carter collectively lost the company somewhere in the region of $300 million. The Curse of Mars was not lifted until Ridley Scott Martian came out in 2015, and in some ways it seems like the exception that proves the rule: a realistic astronaut thriller set on Mars, without any fantasy elements stronger than its hero who doesn't die.
However, there is something to be said for the old-fashioned but relatively down-to-earth pulp that Red Planet delivers—especially in its simple vision of 2025, which is technologically advanced but still fraught with uncomfortable uncertainties. This doesn't exactly demystify Mars, but it does signal that perhaps colonization isn't the miraculous escape plan some people still imagine.
