I caught Red Planet [2000] again the other night. Its the movie with Val Kilmer as the only surviving astronaut on a Mars mission. He eventually returns to the mothership on an old Soviet probe. Its not to be confused with Mission to Mars from the same year when Mars was obviously on millennial film-makers' minds.
Its a good blast at a space drama, Red Planet. Parts of it are really great: the convincing sets, the epic locations and the exciting hardware. I love the hacking of old tech like the Soviet probe. It reminded me a lot of the recent flick The Martian with Matt Damon, where he kitbashes the stuff left around him. I've blogged about this before as its becoming a common trope in modern space films and presumably one which has a chip of realism in it, that colonists' futures may rely on hacking abandoned junk. Pulling it off on screen isn't easy and relies heavily on the talents of the effects team and prop makers in the same way it did in say Gerry Anderson's TV shows and the mastery of Derek Meddings et al.
This time round I also liked the whole moving-ground-bugs thing, which pre-dated Apollo 18 and its scrabbling rock spiders by a good 11 years. There's something profoundly creepy about the idea of insects hiding on other planets and the possibility that they may come to Earth is just as bad!
The Val Kilmer - Tom Sizemore repartee was enjoyable. The whole question of science v. God is a difficult one to pull off but here its done with a light touch.
Alas I found the whole throw-a-colleague-off-a-cliff-and-go-mad-with-guilt sub-plot really irritating. Having said that the overly-macho and aggressive character played by Ben Bratt, who eventually get's thrown off said cliff by Mentalist star Simon Baker, is incredibly annoying in a way that jars within the film. It reminded me of the unnecessarily hostile antics of the geologist in Prometheus, who also meets a shoddy end. These characters just seem out of place.
Aimee I'm still thinking about. It's a sort of Lost in Space companion and more lethal than Mars itself. In the end its predictably blind aggression saves Kilmer, as he propels himself towards The Matrix's Carrie-Ann Moss, falling short of the ship and once more requiring a Matt Mason-like back-pack winch to reel him in, another trope in lots of space flicks [can't think of any though now!]
Alas I found the whole throw-a-colleague-off-a-cliff-and-go-mad-with-guilt sub-plot really irritating. Having said that the overly-macho and aggressive character played by Ben Bratt, who eventually get's thrown off said cliff by Mentalist star Simon Baker, is incredibly annoying in a way that jars within the film. It reminded me of the unnecessarily hostile antics of the geologist in Prometheus, who also meets a shoddy end. These characters just seem out of place.
Aimee I'm still thinking about. It's a sort of Lost in Space companion and more lethal than Mars itself. In the end its predictably blind aggression saves Kilmer, as he propels himself towards The Matrix's Carrie-Ann Moss, falling short of the ship and once more requiring a Matt Mason-like back-pack winch to reel him in, another trope in lots of space flicks [can't think of any though now!]
I'm still unsure about Val Kilmer. He's always been an odd leading man for me, although he was hugely popular in his heyday.
From Willow to post-Keaton Batman, he certainly had an important career in fantasy flicks but for me his non-fantasy pinnacle has to be Heat, the crime epic with Robert De Nero and fellow Red Planeteer Tom Sizemore. His character acting in that is just brilliant.
Have you seen Red Planet? What did you think?
I did enjoy the film and feel spurred on to catch Mission to Mars again from the same year. Did they spawn any toys or collectables?
No comments:
Post a Comment