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| Images courtesy of Arrow Video |
The year 2000 was a double feature for Mars movies and it
wasn’t necessarily the strongest pair.
Beginning with Brian De Palma’s Mission to Mars with Gary Sinise,
Tim Robbins and Don Cheadle followed by Antony Hoffman’s sole directorial
effort Red Planet starring Val Kilmer, Carrie-Anne Moss and Tom Sizemore,
neither film fared well critically or commercially with Mission to Mars barely
breaking even for Disney while Red Planet was a financial loss for Warner
Brothers. For whatever reason, both
projects despite the star power and pedigree of the auteur helming the first
film seemed to lack the urgency or box office draw of, say, Paul Verhoeven’s Total
Recall which prior to Ridley Scott’s The Martian was the definitive
Mars movie.
I remember seeing Red Planet in high school at a
sneak preview from passes given out to students at the lunch hour and being a
seasoned science-fiction aficionado at that young age with such elegant slow burns
as 2001: A Space Odyssey, Silent Running and Solaris behind
me I figured I’d give it a shot. Despite
only running 106 minutes, this was a soporific bore which seemed to waste the
premise, cast and crew as it saunters along.
Now decades later, here is Arrow Video’s 4K UHD in their ongoing efforts
to release deluxe packages of every dated 2000s underperformer. This is a weird ongoing phase for Arrow Video
that doesn’t show any signs of slowing down which might please some fans while
creating coasters for others. In the
process of licensing everything from the Warner Brothers/New Line 2000s slate,
yeah some acquisitions for the boutique label are indeed hotly anticipated but
you have to mostly take the bad with some occasional good here.
In the near future, Earth is in the grip of an ecological
crisis forcing scientists to explore and perhaps seek refuge on Mars. Following over twenty years of unmanned
missions to terraform the planet a crew of astronauts consisting of engineer
Gallagher (Val Kilmer), Lt. Bowman (Carrie-Anne Moss), Dr. Burchenal (Tom
Sizemore) and Dr. Chantilas (Terence Stamp) on the Mars-1 space program are
sent out to establish the first Mars colony.
Following a solar flare, however, the landing module for the planet
crash lands on the surface drenched in monochromatic bright red save for
nighttime scenes, leaving the crew marooned while Lt. Bowman still on the
Mars-1 ship desperately races against time to try and find a way to contact a
rescue mission. Soon however, their
problems of surviving Mars are complicated when their custom shipboard robot is
damaged during the landing and goes into military mode threatening the crew
while indigenous lifeforms on the
planet prove carnivorous and deadly.
Dull, flat and boring then and still so now, despite the expertly
detached and chilly scope cinematography by The Empire Strikes Back and
David Cronenberg’s cameraman Peter Suschitzky and serviceably dated score by
Grame Revell, Red Planet for all of its sparks, explosives and noise
never seems to launch into the science-fiction stratosphere. As with the Vincent Gallo starring Stranded
and even further back Killings at Outpost Zeta, most of the film consists
of mostly good actors wandering the planetary surface before something or someone
starts picking them off without much of an emotional or narrative hook to pull
an audience in. Reportedly a troubled
production filmed on location in Jordan and Outback Australia with much
in-fighting going on between Val Kilmer and Tom Sizemore to the point where
doubles were used in some shots, the film suffers from unmemorable characters and
a general air of humorlessness that renders the whole thing ineffectual and
torpid.
Released theatrically in November 2000 to largely negative
reviews and poor commercial reception, Red Planet like its characters
onscreen slowly dried up and withered into dust at the box office. Roger Ebert was among the only defenders who
in theory compared it to 1950s science-fiction survival tales such as The
Angry Red Planet where characterization and plot was secondary to the simple
act of surviving an enclosure. Considered
to be one of many nails in the coffin of Val Kilmer’s career as a leading man
at the time, it has long since forgotten in spite of Arrow Video’s studious efforts
to try and resurrect the film broken legs, gangrene and all. The cast is excellent but they’re given
nothing to do. The technical merits are
top notch but are in service to an unremarkable vision. Arrow Video’s deluxe edition comes jam packed
with retrospective extras including painstaking attention to detail on the
suits sporting all the expensive corporate logos as well as archival extras
ported over from the Warner release, but I was yawning then and I’m still
yawning now.
--Andrew Kotwicki
