Mission To Mars

After viewing such drivel as Mission to Mars, I'm left pondering several questions. Do reviews that unrelentingly rip into movies of this caliber cease the flow of such horrid pieces of film?  Do reviews make an impact on the potential viewing audience? And most importantly, how does a movie like this ever get green-lighted?

Mission to Mars is a monumental piece of blundering stupidity: a film that manages to make every individual shot and every scene into a bore. It's a film where every possible thing that can go wrong does.

Translation: Mission to Mars is horrible. Avoid it at all costs. It has the potential to be hazardous to your health, and could forever destroy your faith in the moviemaking process.

Where to begin?

I suppose that the foundation to what becomes such a horrible movie lies in the script. It's surely one of the worst I've ever heard, providing the characters with more silly lines of dialogue than I can imagine. It's a special feat when you hear so many unintended laughs. It's also a situational disaster, one where the plotline seems directed towards making good scenes for potential special effects. I can only assume that the scriptwriter had special effects in mind when writing it, as everything in the entire film seems directed towards the nonstop computer work.

Brian De Palma has made some good films. He's even made some great ones. He's been known for stealing every idea in his movies, and Mission to Mars is no different. It's easy to see that the visual style of the film attempts to rival Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, the style of suspense attempts to achieve Apollo 13 levels, and the special effects drive the film in the same way as The Haunting. With so many influences, De Palma can't seem to bring it into a coherent whole, or even into logical individual parts. I'd be hard pressed to find a scene where everything works. A slow scene involving the depressurization of the shuttle comes close, but by the conclusion ends up failing miserably.

The cast is full of B-list actors, definitely a group of people that can achieve something. Unfortunately, they're never given anything to work with, making their characters seem incredibly hollow. Tim Robbins is the best of the bunch, but isn't given enough time to flesh out his character. Gary Sinise's performance is a collection of silly facial expressions. Overall, this is a candidate for the worst ensemble performance I've ever seen.

Mission to Mars is a plague. It's a plague that will earn over 100 million dollars. I give credit to the marketing department, they made the film actually seem interesting during the trailers. I hope that as a reviewer I can make an impact. I'd like to think that people who read this review will trust what I have to say and avoid this film at all costs. It certainly deserves lots of empty seats in the cold, dark theater.

On a scale of 1 to 10 idiots on Mars : 2