Mission to Mars
Mission to Mars is a decent sci-fi film that, unfortunately, calls to mind better sci-fi films. Directed by Brian DePalma (whatever happened to him?) this film was made in 2000 and didn't make much of an impact.Set in the year 2020, which looks pretty much like today, the film is about the first manned mission to Mars. The four-person crew finds some sort of energy source, which freaks out and kills three of them, leaving only Don Cheadle alive. A rescue crew sets out for him, but because it takes six months to get there, they aren't sure he'll be alive when they arrive.
The rescue crew is made up of Tim Robbins, Connie Nielsen, Gary Sinise, and Jerry O'Connell. Robbins and Nielsen are married, while Sinise is still mourning his wife, who was supposed to accompany him but died of cancer. Watching Sinise play wistful sadness for two hours is not pleasant.
There's a fairly tense sequence in which one of the crew ends up stranded, floating in space, his comrades trying to reach him. Other than that, there's very little suspense, more of a sense of awe as we wait to see why there's a giant face carved on the Mars surface.
The ending, which is too reliant on special effects, has direct links to 2001: A Space Odyssey and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I would imagine much of this film would set astrophysicists' eyes rolling, but the suggestion that Mars had a technologically-advanced civilization before Earth even had life is ludicrous. Mars and Earth formed roughly at the same time, if you believe in the Big Bang (and why wouldn't you), so there just wasn't time for Mars to be millions of years ahead of Earth. But, of course, it is science-fiction.
... the suggestion that Mars had a technologically-advanced civilization before Earth even had life is ludicrous.
ReplyDeleteYou may well be right as far as it relates to the movie (I saw it at the time but I don't really remember it), but on its face, I don't know why that would be so ludicrous.
Or more precisely, I don't know if we can say it's ludicrous or not. The only frame of reference we have is to life here on Earth, but we still don't really know how or why life started here, and we don't know a whole lot about conditions here or on Mars billions of years ago. Could intelligent life have developed here millions of years sooner if conditions had been different? Were conditions on Mars more favorable at an earlier point in time? Hell, Mars could have been colonized by aliens from other planets and we wouldn't know.
Point is, who knows? There's no reason to assume that it had to happen on Mars just like it happened here on Earth.