Review of Mission to Mars (2000) by Baurushan J — 31 Dec 2012

Back in 2000 when everyone feared the world will end on that year before you know, the date was moved to 2012, NASA had some ideas about moving their worldwide hometown to Mars so because of that, two movies about Mars went back-to-back during that year and they both flopped miserably at the box office.

One was Red Planet which I actually liked and the other was this movie: Mission To Mars. Directed by the talented Brian De Palma who gave us, Carrie, Scarface (1983) and Mission: Impossible, this man seemed to be having no idea of what was going on during the film's production.

At least he could have changed the script. Anyway the story is about a crew on Mars containing four members who hope to look for new scientific discoveries but an unexplained disaster occurs and three members are killed leaving a fourth member named Luke played by Don Cheadle to survive who loses all radio contact to Earth.

So a rescue mission including four more crew members named Jim, Woody, Terri and Phil arrive at Mars to take him back home and also to check what the disaster really was. The problem with this movie is that whilst it does have great ideas, it doesn't explain it very well.

Just because of the fact that it is a suspense-driven movie, it leaves us to guess the story for us or look on other websites to find out what really happened in the movie which is not fair on us. There's one scene where there is a giant face-shaped building on Mars and it turns out that it was actually a spaceship, and a martian was there as well.

WHAT? How convenient is that. It's been probably been a long time since I watched a movie like this and I can see why people hated this film so much. But whilst people hated this movie less than Red Planet, I've got to say that I liked Red Planet way better than this movie.

Mission to Mars gets a 6.5/10.