Where to watch Mission to Mars
1 Star
When a mysterious storm kills all but one crew member of the first manned mission to mars, a rescue mission is launched. Once on the red planet, the crew finds the sole survivor of the first mission who informs them that this was no ordinary storm. It was meant to protect something. But what?
Mission to Mars is a beautiful-looking dud and one of the big box-office disasters of the early 2000s. The film’s total failure at the box office resulted in Disney closing its Touchstone Pictures label, which was responsible for sizable hits throughout its history. One overblown event film set the beginning of the end in motion. Brian De Palma, a brilliant visual storyteller, is the wrong filmmaker for the project, and his esoteric approach to filmmaking turns this movie into a nearly incoherent mess.
The film’s impressive special effects are useless as they can’t bring to life the thin script while the actors struggle to bring humanity to their cardboard, as written, characters. De Palma incorporates his signature long uninterrupted takes, this time in a dance sequence that stops the film and wreaks of self-indulgence, and these hallmark touches only amplify Mission to Mars’s main problem: the lack of forward momentum. The title alone conjures up a thrilling adventure story, but instead, the movie is a dull, slowly-paced tale about self-sacrifice and reuniting with deceased loved ones.
The year 2000 was tough on veteran directors and their sci-fi projects. De Palma and Coppola, 1970s film school wunderkinder, stumbled with Mission to Mars and Supernova. Neither of those maestros are regularly associated with space movies, and that inexperience, or apathy towards, the genre appears to have negatively impacted both projects. Mission to Mars is Brian De Palma’s worst film; it lacks any connective thematic tissue with his previous works and is among the top ten worst of 2000.
Directed by: Brian De Palma
Written by: Lowell Cannon, Jim Thomas, John Thomas
Starring: Tim Robbins, Gary Sinise, Don Cheadle