A lot of people consider Mission to Mars a pretty bad movie. Too “out there.” I think it actually deals with the subject matter pretty effectively, particularly the ending. (which answers question relating to the origin of life and the history of Mars as an inhabitable planet).
Do y’all think it was a good movie, or just your typical low-brow Hollywood sci-fi flick?
I like it. I own a copy.
This is the age of the internet where things are completely black and white, either the best thing ever or the worst, with no room for shades of grey or nuanced opinion inbetween.
Movies are particularly prone to this, and regarding MtM I thought it was watchable enough but eminently forgettable. I do recall liking the zero-gravity scenes on board the spaceship though.
Well, it and Red Planet were projects that only got green-lit because of the news hysteria surrounding the martian meteor found that may have shown signs of fossilized bacterial life. So right there the films don’t exactly have a lot of artistic ‘cred’ for me.
Mission to Mars I found to be much too pedestrian, like a cheesy TV movie. Besides the myriad of incredibly basic physics errors it made during the EVA rescue seen, there was the whole ‘face on Mars’ nonsense as a key plot-point. I’m sorry but the ‘face’ thing was never more than an amusing optical illusion, and by the time the films came out believing in it was approaching tinfoil-hat lunacy. And the film’s ending wasssss: Just a silly, Spielberg-esque, flashes of lights, astonished looking actors, generic benevolent aliens, 2001-ripoff.
And although I thought Red Planet was better with its first half having a little more of an adult edge, it too ultimately got silly with its turned-evil Jackie Chan karate-fighting robot probe, and a found unmanned Russian lander that inexplicably had a freakin’ graphical user interface (complete with cartoon Russian bear?!?) on it…
I liked it. Not saying that it was a great movie or even an especially good one, just that it isn’t as bad as you’re likely to hear. (I’ve said the same thing about “The Postman”, so give my opinion whatever credit you wish.)
Whoops! I mixed up MtM and Red Planet… Red Planet was better than I expected. MtM was nothing I need to watch a second time.
Isn’t Mission to Mars the one with the massive cellular biology failure at the climax? Like the script didn’t know the difference between a nucleotide and a chromosome, among other things?
No, that was Red Planet. It starred Val Kilmer, Tom Sizemore, and The Matrix chick and ended with all the newly formed Martian bugs dying or bursting into flames or something. Mission to Mars was about finding and decoding an ancient aliens’ message and starred Gary Sinise, Tim Robbins and Don Cheadle.
Mission to Mars was meh, I thought at the time, and I’ve never gone back to have another look. The Tim Robbins character also needlessly (and unscientifically) sacrificed himself IIRC.
Yeah, the one with Connie Nielsen, and the ancient message written in base pairs of DNA, but they were calling them “chromosomes.”
I found that so annoying. Genetics doesn’t work that way at all. How do you even define the normative “end” of a DNA molecule, or a chromosome (an actual chromosome, not the way they were misusing the word)? Telomeres get shed from the end most of the time, don’t they?
If the filmmakers hadn’t tried that bit of nonsense at the end, I probably would have liked it all right. Maybe they thought they could get away with it because it was a field of science not directly connected to planetology or spaceflight, but there are a lot more of us who took basic biology than are planetologists.
Then again, I think there was a lot of saying, “close enough” in that picture. Apparently they overestimated Martian air pressure as well, which I was too ignorant to object to.
I remember, when I was watching it, there was a scene with Martian weather, and someone in the theatre saying, “There’s a mistake; no storms on Mars.” And I thought he was silly. What atmosphere doesn’t have storms? But I guess maybe he had a point? Mars has very low air pressure and temperatures well below the freezing point of water, right? So maybe that kind of storm* is* implausible? Does Mars really not have storms?
That said, I think I did like the stuff before they got to Mars. I don’t remember, because I was so annoyed by a movie that looked relatively realistic going full fantasy (with ignorant biology) at the end.
I’d rather watch something that’s obviously utter fantasy from the beginning.
Mars does have storms, but they’re very tame compared to those on Earth: Climate of Mars - Wikipedia
As I remember, Disney decided to turn some of its theme-park attractions into films and this was the first. One of the later ones was Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl.
Here’s the Bad Astronomy pages for Mission to Mars andRed Planet (spoilers included). He liked Red Planet better too…
I thought it was awful. Bad physics, bad biology, and just plain boring.
Cheesy, yeah, like everyone from actors to director were on MDMA through the whole shoot.