Where to watch Red Planet
1 1/2 Stars
In the near future, Earth is dying. A new colony on Mars could be humanity’s only hope. A team of American astronauts, each a specialist in a different field, is making the first manned expedition to the red planet and must struggle to overcome the differences in their personalities, backgrounds and ideologies for the overall good of the mission. When their equipment suffers life-threatening damage and the crew must depend on one another for survival on the hostile surface of Mars, their doubts, fears and questions about God, man’s destiny and the nature of the universe become defining elements in their fates. In this alien environment they must come face to face with their most human selves.
Red Planet is the second worst movie about Mars, released in 2000. This awful movie, starring a disengaged Val Kilmer, is only marginally better than Brian De Palma’s cinematic folly, Mission to Mars, which beat Red Planet to theaters and was the higher-grossing of the two films. Is this picture a serious piece of sci-fi or a horror film? Is the movie an otherworldly man vs. nature flick or a lowbrow exploitation film? And the answer is Yes.
The script penned by scribes Chuck Pfarrer and Jonathan Lemkin is muddled and unfocused. The film’s story presents Kilmer as the main character, and he’s the least interesting of the dull lot. Carrie-Anne Moss looks like she stumbled into the movie from the Matrix set and performs most of her scenes solo while interacting with a computerized voice running the starship. After the 1999 sci-fi cinema explosion, which propelled the genre to new heights, the year 2000 brought the genre back to Earth with the release of the terrible one-two punch of Mission to Mars and Red Planet.
Directed by: Antony Hoffman
Written by: Chuck Pfarrer, Jonathan Lemkin
Starring: Val Kilmer, Carrie-Anne Moss, Tom Sizemore