Probably 99 percent of all the film critics who walked into a screening of Red Planet had the same thoughts going through their heads: "Please, please, dear God, let this be better than Mission to Mars. PLEASE." And to be honest, they didn't have many reasons to be optimistic. The buzz on Red Planet has been toxic to say the least: the film's release date has been moved twice (it was supposed to come out in March, then August), the studio has kept a tight lip on any and all details, the early trailers have been loud and confusing, and NASA wouldn't even sign off on the film.
So most of the people who walked into this movie knew that it could really, really suck. If you've seen Mission to Mars, Battlefield Earth or, God help you, Highlander 2, you know how truly painful bad sci-fi can be. And the film does not start off on a good note: Carrie Ann-Moss delivers an uninspired monologue about Earth's resources being depleted... blah blah... and here are the rag-tag members of the crew that's going to colonize Mars... blah blah... Earth's last hope... blah... ugh... you sink into your chair, dreading the next 2 hours. Then WHAM, the music suddenly kicks in, you see the spaceship blasting off, and things start getting interesting.
The music is the first sign that things are going right: an interesting combination of techno, rock, orchestration and choral chanting, it hits all the right notes and helps propel the action. It's worth pointing out because movies often drop the ball on music by using either the usual stock musical stings for scary moments, songs that don't fit, or - as in the case of Mission to Mars - hardly any music at all. The first big special effects scene in Mission to Mars was laughable, when the actors just stood there, staring at the effects, without an emotion on their faces and nothing but sound effects on the soundtrack.
Another sign things are going right: you can recognize most of the cast, and they manage to react when something happens to them. Val Kilmer (The Saint), Tom Sizemore (Saving Private Ryan), Carrie Ann-Moss (The Matrix) and Benjamin Bratt (TV's Law and Order) make up the majority of the ship's crew, and their performances are pretty good across the board. Val Kilmer finally sheds his usual cinematic indifference and actually acts like a human being for once. Terrence Stamp (Superman 2, Bowfinger) also makes an appearance at the beginning of the film, but it's more of a glorified cameo.
The story skips along with a few moments of life on the crew's spaceship, and then something goes wrong (of course) that causes them to have an emergency landing. The emergency landing gets screwed up (of course) and they lose most of their equipment and miss the landing site. They finally get to the base, which has been destroyed (of course) and slowly run out of air. As they await their doom, Val Kilmer finally flips out and opens his helmet... and discovers he can breathe. All of the algae that had been sent to the planet is gone, the entire Mars base that was set up is gone, and they can breathe. Huh?
While the crew tries to figure that one out, Ms. Moss tries to help them from the wrecked spaceship above. This involves many special effects sequences of her running around and doing stuff, which, if you saw The Matrix, is nothing to object to. There's also some fairly creative and original use of zero gravity fire, and the crew on Mars has some interesting solutions to the problems they encounter.
Speaking of the fairly creative, let us not forget AMEE. AMEE is the robotic dog thing that you might have seen in the commercials, that prowls about and decides to kill the crew. You see, AMEE is a military robot that was lent to this peaceful mission, and if a small switch is flipped it goes back into military mode. That switch is permanently flipped in the crash (of course), and AMEE becomes a killing machine that knows kung fu. Killer robots, breathable air, Carrie Ann-Moss, oh my!
As you can gather, this is all pretty silly. But the f/x are pretty good, the script is above average, a few memorable one-liners are uttered ("This is the day our math teachers told us would come: when algebra would save out lives.") and you care about most of the characters. Not to mention AMEE makes a pretty badass villain of sorts, although not as impressive as the species they eventually find on Mars... but let's not give everything away.
