Red Planet

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Director Antony Hoffman decided to retire right after his first and only feature film presentation, the one which is not happened to be called Hostile Giant Space-Leeches from Galaxy Xixugon Whom Release Nerve Gases To Kill All 3, instead chose to enrich consensus by the more simple yet highly informative title Red Planet. It is not a communist propaganda though, or a very masterfully concealed at that it is. Red Planet gives us a rather acceptably realized and presented fictional output about the first (wo)manned expedition to Mars. Of one thing, you can be supersure of, though: if and when Hollywood gives you a rendition of an expedition to Mars, then something will go: terribly, terrrribly wrong. Red Planet submits hastily and keenly to this surficial observation, inventing whole new and pretty interesting tastes and dimensions of trouble.

The synopsis is this: Earth is exhausted, overpopulated AND nearly out of Cola and oxygen, too. Intended solution is to send through space probes to Mars with alga on board, so the plants could produce oxygen on the Red Planet. Bizarrely enough: one day oxygen levels do start to drop, and no one knows why it is happening - thus an expedition is sent over to Mars both to find out the reason for oxygen droppings and to confirm that the planet looks and feels OK otherwise. At least, those are the unvoiced hopes of Wo(man)kind.

Behold Carrie-Anne Moss, Commander of the ship and primal coordinator of the expedition. She is highly OK in the movie except maybe for the silly segments in which she is to exhibit personality mixture of intact authority and leisure, this is something that she was asked to do though, let us not forget this. Suffice it to say that Red Planet, being a movie released in 2000, delivers some hilarious effect-cravers to convince all of how a woman can be a good and skilled drinker. Like you ever would deny such a skill set from a woman.



As you will surely, at least likely notice, primal protagonist is Val Kilmer, supported by totally acceptable sidekick performances from - most notably - Tom Sizemore, Benjamin Brett and Simon Baker, who actually sucks noticeably, but this is OK, as so does his character. It is not to say that his character or his performance would lack legit function or significant content, though: quite the contrary.

Antony Hoffman's movie is highly aware of and subtly serves the universal approaches and methods of group-related sci-fi storytelling. While characters are diverse in their personalities, differences are not too massively and/or redundantly emphasized. Protagonists instead tend to deliver their focal personal notions they could come up with to this day, an element the movie goes for a more serious (?) touch with, yet surely it fails wonderfully in the long run. This latter observation correlates with the brief yet intact role delivered by Terence Stamp. One can not escape the impression that the writers could not help giving abruptly away absolutely ALL that Stamp's "deeply spiritual character" was about. These elements were not too numerous though: Stamp has maybe three or four lines of semi-serious spirituality to deliver prior Higher Forces will decide that it is better for him to benefit the mission via other ways than originally intended.



The I AM ONE WITH THE UNIVERSE! - look and posture.

The expedition goes awry before it would have a chance to actually start: the ship stumbles upon a blatantly powerful solar flare thus many of the equipments end up being in need of immense care and repairs. Moss needs to stay on the main ship and release the surface capsule from outer space manually, as the launcher itself is malfunctioning. It will shock you tremendously though that the surface capsule will be boarded by all the other expedition members and they will be on their way in a short time to explore the surface of the Red Planet. More specifically: to locate the human made HAB1 facility which supposedly contains resources making life and thus further explorations possible for a small group for six months.



- Not a damn toilet ANYWHERE around!
- PLEASE tell me you are KIDDING.

If things were just "this easy": during the landing procedure, many vital equipments are scattered throughout the planet's surface including primary navigational instruments that could have calculate and point out the most effective way to HAB1. Little though intense time do remain nevertheless until your protagonists do manage to locate the facility - just to find it utterly, completely destroyed.

This is the actual turning point of Red Planet from which on quite integral drama is formed. Giving away actual portions of the narrative would spoil enjoyment significantly, thus I refrain to do that herein. Yet, giving elements away and but outlining them vaguely is not identical: suffice it to say that the movie chooses to utilize a quite nice, yet, at the same time, pretty cleverly emotional concept to enrich itself with via the total lack of communication capabilities between the leader ship in outer space and the crew members of Mars. I think there is something subtle and bizarre to this solution: both the leader ship with it's superior logistic abilities and the crew are in the embrace of Mars, yet they can not exchange information with each other now that the planet finally reveals it's true, - amazingly enough - planetary proportions. Mars is not just an enigmatic crimson blob far-far away from the place you likely reading this from, but it is also a galactic entity of vast and intimidate proportions that do imprison visitors if they approach these proportions and conditions unprepared. Or: unequipped, as the crew members do end up as here.



Red Planet introduces and maintains a firm ability to move it's narrative on through radical developments, keeping interest factor intact and stable. Though one could - in my opinion - falsely argue that there is not much that could go on on a desolated planet with five people and a mechanical superunit on it's surface, those vast perspectives definitely do gain "bonus appeals" when they are observed and affected by human. Here is how planetary proportions could be easily affected by a single, puny human: you affect them by looking at them. By doing so, you affected them already, don't you think?

There are living, in this case: humane motives are present not just in front of these vast distances, but literally ON them, trying to reach their fruity conclusions on a place which is deeply alienated for the human we currently know of as a specie. Man observed Mars from great distance, now man observers HIMSELF on Mars. And surely, Mars is present all over the place - SIC! - to observe man's observations.



Red Planet is not half as bad as many did, would or will claim to you it is. Thanks to it's primal depiction of the enigmatic, desolated crimson planet and the decent microcommunity drama to take place on the surface, the movie tolerated passing years in a quite unnoticeable fashion, if production values are concerned. And they ARE concerned, when the Opinion Onion emerges to scrutinize! My only whining factor would concern the musical support for the piece, as that is extremely shallow saved for the decent, funny songs to save something of the credit list. Apart from this though, it is safe to say that Red Planet, similarly to it's prime inspirator Mars, never ever made the effort to deny time, as they both seem to be in a very intact harmony with it. Thus no need to deny the ultimate conqueror, - which is time, by the way - as the majority of what the film shows are eternal sights and experiences to behold and to live through.



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