RED PLANET (2000) Kilmer vs. AMEE - and who would cheer for Kilmer? I take back everything I said about Mission To Mars looking so good. This movie looks much better. Too bad that its look and an extremely cool robot are about all it's got going for it. Red Planet was second out of the gate of last year's pair of Mars movies, and while its aspirations are much more humble, it still manages to botch them, though at least it didn't leave me begging for mercy in the final fifteen minutes. Earth is fucked! Yes, we've fucked the earth, fucked 'er good with pollution and apathy (c'mon, have a little faith in humanity! Oh, fine, don't.). We've fucked her so bad we actually have to move - the obvious candidate for relocation being Mars, which has been getting bombarded with algae for 20 years in order to create some oxygen. But oxygen levels have started dropping for some reason, so a mission is dispatched to check it out and see what's going on. As soon as the ship arrives, a solar flare screws everything up (great timing), stranding the entire crew except for the captain on the surface of the planet, sending their pet robot in to "CRUSH KILL DESTROY" mode, and the captain stuck upstairs on the ship, talking to the computer. The captain is played by Carrie-Ann Moss, who avoids typecasting herself as the no-nonsense butt-kicking sci-fi chick here by actually managing to have less personality than a stick. Nobody will ever, ever remember her for being in this movie. If you've seen it, I'll bet you've already forgotten, looking up her filmography and thinking to yourself, "She was in Red Planet? Since when?" At least the other characters get to be stereotypes. Moss doesn't even get that much to work with. Almost all of her solo scenes on that ship are deadly dull; while her crew is on the planet running out of air and scrambling for a way back up into orbit, she cuts herself on a little shard of glass. Oh, the excitement. Moss provides the intro to the film in voiceover, summing up all the other characters in the movie with about one sentence each. I'm reminded of ads I saw, years ago, for some post-Melrose Place prime-time soap which did the same thing with each character (e.g. "Liar liar pants on fire" for one bad-girl-looking woman). Benjamin Bratt plays the arrogant hunky guy, Tom Sizemore plays the irreverent scientist guy, Terence Stamp plays the I-was-a-scientist-but-now-I've-found-God guy. At least Stamp's reason for this conversion ("I realized science couldn't answer any of the really interesting questions") is better than that given by Gabriel Byrne in Stigmata (where he basically says he concluded that anything he was unable to explain as a scientist must be God). Stamp gets a really early exit from the film, which is utterly unsurprising, since I find it hard to imagine a great actor like Stamp wanting to stick through this movie all the way to the end. Val Kilmer, on the other hand, is virtually guaranteed to make it to the closing credits in one piece. For that matter, figuring out exactly who'll survive this movie and who won't is about as difficult as figuring out whether Riker, Worf, or Rodriguez is coming back from that away mission. There are a number of cool things about Red Planet, mostly in the effects, props, and gadgetry ideas. I don't think I've ever seen anybody attempt to show a fire in zero-gravity before, and damn, it looks cool. I loved the way the Mars lander, preparing for a crash, pops balloons from every side to bounce around on impact, looking like a big purple raspberry. The astronauts also all have cool, portable roll-out data screens, which seem more compact than toting around a PC everywhere you go. The movie's most interesting star is probably AMEE - that robot which goes from cute to brute just because they dropped her onto another planet from orbit - it's one cool robot, like a metallic, feline contortionist which is certainly a better reason to see this movie than Moss or Kilmer. VERY COOL ROBOT, and goddammit, I want one; it'd kick the ass of anything else on Battlebots. Still, I don't really understand why the marines would give this mission a robot that can be turned into a killing machine with the flip of a switch. This does not seem like a feature that a mission to an uninhabited planet is likely to have use for, unless of course you happen to be making a movie about it and need to spice things up. (I didn't really WANT to like the robot so much, since I strongly suspect that this script started with some not-bad ideas and ended up as a human-vs.-the-berzerk-robot story, but it's so cool!) Yeah, the plot here's pretty contrived; that solar flare happens minutes within their arrival in orbit around the planet (gee, good thing it didn't happen any time during the previous six months of the mission), oxygen turns up just when it's most needed (nobody seems to have thought of whether it might or might not be really, really cold on the surface of Mars), and killer bugs (!) are dispatched with astonishing ease. Astronauts, hiking over impossibly rocky terrain in spacesuits which are pretty restrictive (despite the cool retractable helmets), walk 100 kilometers in 19 hours. Minus several hours to sleep and wait out a blizzard. And for a bunch of geniuses who should, in theory, be the best and the brightest, they sure do find some dopey ways to conclude their lifetimes, like when one of these guys falls off a cliff, sending me into peals of laughter, despite that obviously not being the intent. I guess one can't expect too much from a sci-fi movie which posits that 45 years in the future, we'll still be listening to Sting. Talk about no faith in humanity. Directed by TV-commercial-grad Antony Hoffman. BACK TO THE R's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE