By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
July 8, 2015
Fifteen years ago, two big red cinematic bombs were unleashed upon the movie-going public. The marginally superior of these two films was Mission to Mars, a Brian De Palma helmed effort that debuted in March 2000 and starred Gary Sinise, Don Cheadle and Tim Robbins. The other Mars movie was Red Planet, a November release headlined by Val Kilmer, Carrie-Anne Moss and Tom Sizemore.
Mission to Mars was an ideas movie with action, an attempt by a great director to make a successor to 2001: A Space Odyssey. By contrast, Red Planet was an action movie with ideas — an effort to replicate the original Jurassic Park in a science fiction milieu. By this I mean not that Red Planet is a monster movie, as Steven Spielberg’s 1993 blockbuster is, but that, like the earlier movie, Red Planet attempts to envelop its candy-coated center with a veneer of scientific concepts.
There are plenty of differences between the two movies, of course, one of them being that Jurassic Park had an excellent script. Red Planet can’t claim the same, unfortunately. It was penned by Chuck Pfarrer and Jonathan Lemkin, who between them have no credit more impressive than Navy Seals or The Devil’s Advocate. Which isn’t to say that these movies — or their other outings, such as Virus or Shooter — are bad; it’s just that, like Red Planet, they’re simply not very distinguished.
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