Colonizing
Mars, if for nothing else but to grow food, is the idea whose time has
definitely come. The scientists have been churning scenarios and
possibilities given our still relatively limiting technology, and
Hollywood, naturally, hasn’t been far behind in capitalizing on the next frontier. The making of
Red Planet is,
therefore, a foregone conclusion as are many more films that will follow
to dazzle us with the transformation of what has only recently been
viewed as science fiction into possible reality. However, apart from
holding our interest with technological possibilities, Red Planet
dishes out an over-commercialized compilation of what worked in past
blockbuster movies instead of serving its own story filled with intriguing ideas.
The mission of MARS-1 crew is to figure out what
went wrong with the Mars Terraforming project and fix it. In 2050, the
Earth is overpopulated and just about all used up, so the success of
MARS-1 is the only hope for human survival. As we can expect, everything
goes wrong, and the crew must forego the challenge of saving the human
kind while they struggle to find a way off the death trap that is the
action packed reality of Mars.
The visual effects nearly mesmerize with the
realistic concepts of long distance space travel, Mars landing pods,
unfolding digital mapping devices, and AMEE, the jackpot prize of the
visual effects team. AMEE (Autonomous Mapping Evaluation and Evasion) is
a multifunctional robot who looks like a dog and twists and flips like a
gymnast. If we consider fun as one of the film’s primary goals, then
the Red Planet delivers.
Matrix fans will be
thrilled to see Carrie-Anne Moss in the leading role of mission
commander Kate Bowman. She is a hit alongside Val Kilmer as Gallagher,
Mechanical Systems Engineer, also known as the janitor of the space age.
Moss caries the movie with her screen magnetism and steely, hard-edged
beauty. She is more than perfectly suited to play the female in charge
of five men on a crucial mission, but sadly, her romantic tension with
Gallagher leaves much to be desired because it lacks emotional depth and
practical complexity.
Many logic holes plague the story, but we were far
more disappointed by the oversimplified characters whose spiritual,
emotional, and physical challenges look like a stitch work of action
scenes from Aliens and Terminator. Struggle for survival, romance, even elements of horror seem strategically
woven in but carry little beyond the spectacle value, fascinating as it
may be.
In a valiant attempt to raise the ever-pressing
tension between science and faith that surrounds these kinds of sci-fi
"thought" pieces, we suppose the movie intends to leave us
with a sense that our faith in benign evolutionary forces driven by some
kind of intelligence will ultimately save us. We were left pondering and
talking about the likelihood of people overpopulating and over-toxifying
the Earth to the point of extinction. The scientific arrogance in
thinking that we can control or even predict the long-range outcomes of
our advancements, regardless of how beneficial they seem at first, may
just be what dooms us. Even in Red Planet’s last chance for survival
mission, the shortsighted and short-lived results of scientific vanity
seem to point towards self-destruction. The question of when we’ll be
advanced enough to evaluate and maybe alter our course as a species on
this planet lingers on and rightly so. Perhaps, the words of Chantilas
(Terence Stamp) say it best. "Science could not answer all the
interesting questions, so I’ve turned to philosophy and have been
searching for God ever since."
