Copyright Inverse
In the year 2000, there were two major sci-fi movies about the planet Mars in theaters. Neither did well, and neither is well remembered today. The first was Brian De Palma’s Mission to Mars, a kind of sideways Disney project, loosely based on the 1975 Disney World ride of the same name. The second was Red Planet, a Warner Bros. effort that attempted to present itself as a hard science fiction movie, which, strangely, feels like the pilot of a somewhat decent TV series today. Was the world just not ready for a movie like Red Planet? Does it deserve its embarrassing 14 percent on Rotten Tomatoes? The answer is somewhat complicated. While it’s very difficult to say Red Planet is a great sci-fi gem, it’s utterly unfair to say it’s a bad one. Spoilers ahead. Red Planet is set in what was then the near future and now our present, and right away, it presents itself as a climate change movie. Humankind has been terraforming Mars remotely because aspects of Earth have just proved unlivable. So, a combined effort has been underway to send algae over to Mars to generate oxygen, but now it’s stopped. Why? Almost aggressively, Red Planet is a science fiction movie about scientific problems that can only have scientific solutions. This isn’t to say that everything is 100 percent accurate, but there is a bit of The Martian fused with Gravity, well before either of those stories existed. Carrie-Anne Moss, fresh from The Matrix, gets her big moment as Kate Bowman, the commander of a mission that consists of all men. This isn’t to say that this is any easy job for her, and the movie reminds us more than once that men who want to go to Mars might want to do so to start the human race over completely. When the crew gets inebriated on homemade moonshine halfway into the trip, Santen (Benjamin Bratt) suggests that they could repopulate the human race on Mars, implying that Bowman would help in this process. Santen is an unlikable jerk who was told to have countless romantic partners back on Earth. And although his natalist view is written in the context of a horrible moment, it's oddly prescient of some disturbing conversations from certain men today, who also want to make Mars into a kind of redo for humanity. Bowman being forced to tolerate the overt boorish sexism of Santen and the other crew members is tempered by the fact that she and Gallahger (Val Kilmer), the ship’s maintenance man, seem to have real chemistry. When Bowman is forced to stay on the ship, and the rest of the crew land on Mars, the movie pivots away from what might have been its emotional saving grace: We kind of want to see Bowman and Gallagher team-up on Mars as partners, but instead, they have to pine for each other, silently, for most of the movie, while Bowman is in orbit and Gallagher and the rest of the team are on Mars. This is Red Planet’s greatest mistake. Because, putting aside the film’s basic problems, its greatest crime is sidelining Carrie-Ann Moss. The mystery of the missing algae and a certain robot-gone-rogue plot all provide plenty of tension and excitement and real stakes once the movie actually gets to Mars. Kilmer isn’t giving the performance of a lifetime, but he’s likable, funny, and heroic in a reliable kind of way. It’s the sort of performance that reminds you how good Kilmer was in the late 1990s and early 2000s and why his passing earlier this year is a true tragedy. Again, in the light of many space movies and space TV shows (like For All Mankind) existing today, Red Planet is a slow burn for 2000 but a speed run for 2025. The basic concept and dynamics of this Mars mission could occupy a decent full season of a solid sci-fi show now. And, seen through that light, Red Planet’s economy of storytelling is somewhat commendable. Had it shuffled its characters around differently and perhaps jettisoned a few characters entirely, it might have been remembered as a tight, well-paced sci-fi classic. As it stands, Red Planet is less like a movie and more like a pop culture rough draft. The various studios hadn’t quite figured out how to make a concept like this work in the year 2000, but, arguably, without a movie like this happening then, we wouldn’t be in such a robust sci-fi landscape today. Red Planet is streaming to rent on Apple TV, Prime Video, and elsewhere.
