MARTIAN SICKNESS
by Bill Reiser

In a year during which Brian DePalma has already confirmed his hackdom with Mission to Mars, we've now received RED PLANET, proving that the heads of studio chiefs are filled with green cheese. One more cinematic piss on its crimson terrain will get that whole "angry red planet" mojo working again.

Assuming stars don't do them for money - koff koff - what explains the casting of these twin towers of turdola? Mission gets Sinise and Robbins and Cheadle? (Okay, we'll chalk that up to DePalma's largely unearned rep, which has to be dimming like Brother Jeb's chances for free matzoh in Palm Beach.) Red Planet's pedigree is less impressive, but still, wouldn't you think one of the stars might have smelled the stink of death on the script? Guess not.

It's kind of pointless to bother with plot - you know the drill: a Bush administration fouls the earth, we start terraforming Mars, zip off a manned mission to see how many Starbucks we can fit in, Things Go Awry, actors try to keep a straight face while mouthing lines more forced than those in the cut scenes of Final Fantasy, and the biggest star survives to spit out the clunky tag line and get the girl in zero-g. Sorry if that spoils it for anyone.

The variations on the theme in Red Planet include Val Kilmer's real love interest, a gizmo that acts like a nifty robot dog when it's not killing the second-tier cast members in PG-13 style, and the best use of nipples in a white t-shirt since The Deep. (I found myself so bored I was looking for evidence to support the rumors that Kilmer and Tom Sizemore were so at odds on the set that they refused to be filmed together - inconclusive, although if it's true they should have put the money it took for those special effects into the space stuff.) In spite of it all, I still find Kilmer an interesting actor, and wonder when he's going to take his head out of his ass long enough to start making good movies again.

My favorite moment in a "sci-fi" movie all year is the brilliant final shot of Space Cowboys, a wordless sequence that says more about the excitement and lure...hell, the majesty...of space than all 4 hours and $150 million of rote, cookie-cutter "Mars movie" bullshit we've seen this year. Hopefully the Mars miniseries that James Cameron is working on will leave Red Planet in its red dust.

CineScene, 2000