Review of The Last Days on Mars (2013) by Midlands M — 09 Jul 2014

This sci-fi horror has to fight the curse of films with Mars in the title (e.g. Mission to Mars and John Carter from Mars) and stars Liev "will always be Cotton Weary from Scream" Schreiber and British actress Olivia Williams as part of a crew sent to Mars to run a number of scientific experiments.

The film jumps straight onto the red planet with a neat motif of the refrain "blue sky" both in the script and the lyrics of an old musical song and the location shooting (in Jordan) shows some solid desert desolation photography standing in for the Martian landscape.

Sadly, this promising start quickly falls apart as the space vehicles, walks and crew briefings are aiming for realism but the TV-style eye-level camera work is merely monotonous. The film (space) walks the wrong line between realism and boredom and they ironically come to find life on Mars but can barely muster any atmospherics between the anonymous crew members who get infected by an alien parasite one-by-one.

With little character development, the second half does show some more eerie promise but the first half set up (which forgets filmmaking basics of close-ups, cutaways and angles to create meaning) is so slow you'll be lucky to make it.

"This doesn't make any sense", says a character and I agree with him as although Williams' bitchy boss is a role with a sense of over the top nonsense, the film had me shouting at both its ludicrous plot (anyone with a passing interest in science would have screamed "quarantine" at some point) and the subsequent stupid crew who once infected looked like drunken space chimps.

Despite the good make up and everyone giving it their best shot, the film has almost no music/soundtrack (a big omission for me when considering the best orchestral electronic scores of past space films), a clichéd "blurred" 1990s dream sequence and the fact it took just £24k at the box office reflects the reality that in space, no one can hear you yawn.

4/10. Midlands Movies Mike.