RogerBW's Blog

The Last Days on Mars 29 April 2014

2013, dir. Ruairi Robinson, Liev Schreiber, Elias Koteas: IMDb / allmovie

Towards the end of a manned mission to Mars, things start to go wrong.

I suspect that this may be the right way to begin a film about weird stuff happening on Mars: don't rely on the audience's sensawunda to be super impressed with your shiny spaceship (like Red Planet and Mission to Mars), but start just before things begin to go amiss. A modern audience can get the hang of who people are pretty quickly.

On the other hand it means, as usual, that they're all behaving like emotional idiots. Yeah, NASA does actually have psychologists who wouldn't put people on a mission if they had so little ability to get on with others as we see here.

Still, the first thirty-five minutes are pretty good: Alien-esque lurking horror and a slow building of tension. Then it all goes to pot in the initial attack. It's a shaky-cam action sequence, which I'm already not a fan of, and the flashing yellow emergency lights make the already murky film practically unwatchable.

From that point on, it's basically a zombie survival story (of the cordyceps, baculovirus, toxoplasma gondii flavour). Run, fight, lose a character, escape, repeat. Not that I have any particular objection to a zombie survival story, but this could have been so much more fun than that. After this moment the film really has nothing more to say; not just to me, to anyone who's ever seen this sort of film before. Unfortunately it takes another hour not to say it.

Darn it. I really wanted to like this one. I had a theory that there'd been a little thinky-SF boom in the last year or so, but this was one of the planks of that theory and it turns out to be more woodworm than plank.

As with Apollo 18, I think part of the problem is how suddenly the film turns from space adventure to zombie menace. I enjoyed Ghosts of Mars, after all, in part because it never gives the impression it's going to be anything more than enjoyable trash. This held out the promise of something better, then took it away.

Acting's decent, with Olivia Williams the only stand-out (as she usually is), but the whole cast is pretty impressive; pity they're so constrained by the script. Direction is fine until things go to pot, then the camera-work goes shaky and the cuts come quickly.

[Buy this at Amazon] and help support the blog. ["As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases."]

Comments on this post are now closed. If you have particular grounds for adding a late comment, comment on a more recent post quoting the URL of this one.

Search
Archive
Tags 1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s 2010s 3d printing action advent of code aeronautics aikakirja anecdote animation anime army astronomy audio audio tech aviation base commerce battletech beer boardgaming book of the week bookmonth chain of command children chris chronicle church of no redeeming virtues cold war comedy computing contemporary cornish smuggler cosmic encounter coup covid-19 crime cthulhu eternal cycling dead of winter doctor who documentary drama driving drone ecchi economics en garde espionage essen 2015 essen 2016 essen 2017 essen 2018 essen 2019 essen 2022 essen 2023 existential risk falklands war fandom fanfic fantasy feminism film firefly first world war flash point flight simulation food garmin drive gazebo genesys geocaching geodata gin gkp gurps gurps 101 gus harpoon historical history horror hugo 2014 hugo 2015 hugo 2016 hugo 2017 hugo 2018 hugo 2019 hugo 2020 hugo 2022 hugo-nebula reread in brief avoid instrumented life javascript julian simpson julie enfield kickstarter kotlin learn to play leaving earth linux liquor lovecraftiana lua mecha men with beards mpd museum music mystery naval noir non-fiction one for the brow opera parody paul temple perl perl weekly challenge photography podcast politics postscript powers prediction privacy project woolsack pyracantha python quantum rail raku ranting raspberry pi reading reading boardgames social real life restaurant reviews romance rpg a day rpgs ruby rust scala science fiction scythe second world war security shipwreck simutrans smartphone south atlantic war squaddies stationery steampunk stuarts suburbia superheroes suspense television the resistance the weekly challenge thirsty meeples thriller tin soldier torg toys trailers travel type 26 type 31 type 45 vietnam war war wargaming weather wives and sweethearts writing about writing x-wing young adult
Special All book reviews, All film reviews
Produced by aikakirja v0.1