"If you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all."
Good advice, except sometimes I'm left bursting with a rant. So I'll do what I can with saying something nice - first.
Damn. It's hard.
Some of the actors had their good moments. Cheadle, when talking to Sinise about the upcoming mission. Nielsen, when free-fall dancing with Robbins.
Visually, the movie was fairly appealing, giving shots of Mars features the way Sagan would have loved to have done them 20 years ago.
But what a waste of effort!
Not that the movie didn't start out nicely. We get to meet good guy Luke and good guy Jim, and we find out what great buddies all these astronauts are, and that the guys all have sexy wives, except Jim, which is properly tragic. But instead of going somewhere with all that, the story deteriorates rapidly into pointless special effects and contrived plot and, to quote one reviewer whose advice I should have heeded, cheese.
I'd loved to have seen the accident on Mars 2 be dealt with by their competent crew back Earthside: maybe something like Apollo 13, where we all knew how the story was going to end, but were still sitting on the edge of our seats. Instead we're treated to a series of predictable events that would more properly be found in one of the "Airport" movies.
It would have been nice if the mystery on Mars were something interesting. Instead one of those damned space aliens pops up and ruins the whole story. If I never see a group of supposedly intelligent humans gazing worshipfully at an elfin space alien again in my life, it will be too soon! (Someone shut off the music!) This thing is evil! Its stupid burglar alarm killed three crew members! What's wrong with you all?
The problem is, of course, that for many people space aliens have supplanted our conventional deities. They're either very very good, and can get away with anything they like, or they're very very evil, and nothing they do is right. Few intelligent treatments of non-human intelligent beings like "Enemy Mine" exist, and apparently "Mission to Mars" wasn't going to be one, either.
Finally, "Mission to Mars" had the opportunity to use our fin-de-siecle movie technology to present viewers with a realistic picture of what such missions to Mars will actually be like. But nope! The shots of the centrifuge have astronauts scurrying up and down the ladders with no sign of Coriolis' gentle push. Jim McConnell runs around for minutes without his helmet on, when he should be more intimately acquainted with emergency procedures than any of the rest. They shut down the centrifuge without going through a lock-down. Computer consoles announce in cheerful color and complex graphics that the computers have crashed. Systems that can show pretty pictures of fuel running to the engines can't detect a loss of pressure. What the heck was with that explosion?
Aside from the problem that jumping out of a spacecraft that missed orbital insertion isn't going to stop the intrepid astronauts from missing orbit, too, I'd have hoped that they could at least have demonstrated how orbital mechanics work. But no, complete systems failure there, too. The astronauts go *faster* to catch a spaceship that orbits *lower*. Even after Blake tumbles into space he somehow manages to stop tumbling and maintain attitude, even though his space suit is out of fuel. Good trick!
Mars gravity is 1/3 Earth's, but nothing in the movie even hints at this. Even the makeshift sled they drag to the base camp seems to be pulled down by Earth gravity. And if the computers were wiped out by the EMP, what the heck is Luke running with that breadboard assembly?
The remaining gaffs of the movie pale besides these problems. But I wouldn't want to stop here and fail to point out that alien DNA used to jump start life on Earth has no more chance of being recognized as "human" than would cockroach DNA, nor breaths there a biologist who can recognize human DNA from a computerized animation of the double helix. The "movie" of evolution was a travesty. The aliens should have just moved to the Earth instead of flying off to another galaxy, and galaxies are terribly far away compared to the stars in our own galaxy, and the stoopid aliens didn't even give McConnell so much as a steering wheel! And if they're so dang concerned about acceleration that they drown McConnell in breathable fluid, then what's with the spinning during takeoff? And why is it necessary to destroy the "face on Mars"?
What's particularly galling to me is that the two SF movies in recent memory that I actually enjoyed, "Mystery Men" and "Galaxy Quest", weren't even supposed to be taken seriously. Therein, I think, lies an explanation of why SF is still, by and large, best done with the printed word.