Not that great (Red Planet (DVD))

Member Name: defiler

Product:	Red Planet (DVD)
Date:	01/04/01 (26 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: If you are science-fiction mad you might get a little enjoyment from it

Disadvantages: Poor storyline, boring.

Being a fan of science fiction films I thought that this would be a film that I should enjoy, however it was quite a bit of a let down and something that just wasn't really worth watching.

The film stars Carrie-Anne Moss(The Matrix) who's acting, while still not bad, doesn't come close to her performance in The Matrix. Perhaps she just wasn't comfortable in the role, but it does show at times when her performance just seems a bit dull. Other than her, Val Kilmer and Tom Sizemore are the main stars, however their characters didn't really stick in my mind and their performances couldn't really enhance a fairly dull movie.

The basic plot of the film is set in the year 2050 when Earth is dying and Mars seems to be humans only hope of survival. Man has been on a long term mission to colonise Mars as they need somewhere else to live, Kate Bowman (Carrie-Anne Moss) and the rest of her crew are sent to Mars to check the missions progress. However, when they arrive they discover that not everything is going to plan (just for a change I'd like to see a film where everything *did* go according to plan, although falling asleep during it :). After a crash landing on the planet the majority of the crew is left without food, help or much hope of escape and as each minute passes their chances of survival (and the entire human race's) gets smaller and smaller.

The storyline is your typical "lets try and save Earth and get into trouble doing it so then try and work our way back to safety with some of us not surviving" type of story, don't expect any real surprises here, to be honest I don't think theres anything in this movie that I haven't seen before (often better) elsewhere.

The film does have an occasional comic moment such as the computer responding to what would normally be a talkin-to-self "That's not good..." with "No it isn't" (OK, this doesn't sound
that funny here, but it wasn't too bad on the film), however overall the film isn't really meant to be a comedy so these moments are fairly rare.

The acting doesn't seem that great, some of the characters just don't seem to be that convincing and other actors just don't seem to be living up to their full potential leading to less convincing characters.

Some bits of the film seem unlikely, such as being happy to find something a short time after leaving someone behind who has a good chance of dying, however this seems to be a problem with most films and the audience often doesn't want everyone to be constantly miserable throughout an entire film.

Some parts are predictable, the first time you see the robot that is along on the mission to help the crew you just know that later on it's going to end up going insane and trying to kill everyone, it's something that seems to happen in just about every film that has a robot in it (and in case you think I'm giving away too much of the plot here, anyone who's read the back of the video would know this happens).

I personally felt the storyline was overall quite boring, it varies between being quite slow and uninteresting to having some bland action scenes that never really seem that special. It does have its occasional interesting moment and starts interesting enough, however as the film progresses I got less and less interested in what was happening and was quite bored by the end and couldn't care what happened to the crew. Considering this is the type of film I usually enjoy, it's quite strange for me to get so little enjoyment out of a film like this.

Perhaps it's just me, but I always like to see some of the new types of technology that movies like this introduce, however I felt a bit let down with nothing really interesting added. The robot was nice enough to look at, however it's hardly an original concept and many of
the other items just seemed to be copied from one place or another (probably because it's quite hard to come up with completely original ideas now).

Overall this was a film that bored me and wasn't really worth watching. You might enjoy it, however I really didn't and wouldn't recommend it to anyone.

Summary: