Colibel Terrible acting, screenplay and direction.

Tacticalin An absolute waste of money

2freensel I saw this movie before reading any reviews, and I thought it was very funny. I was very surprised to see the overwhelmingly negative reviews this film received from critics.

Brendon Jones It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

The Grand Master Red Planet is best described as a disaster. The movie could have been a moderate success, but the end result was just a pointless and boring journey from start to finish. When you have a cast featuring the likes of Val Kilmer, Carrie-Anne Moss, Tom Sizemore, Simon Baker, Benjamin Bratt and Terence Stamp, there would be a chance that this could be watchable. Nope. Not even close. Even the cast could not redeem this poorly unoriginal science fiction movie. Red Planet centers on a group of astronauts tasked to conduct research on the colonization of Mars in order to save the human race on Earth which is slowly dying. The diverse but equally talented and intelligent group of astronauts include Robby Gallagher (Val Kilmer, Batman Forever), Kate Bowman (Carrie-Anne Moss, The Matrix) Ted Santen (Benjamin Bratt, Law and Order), Chip Pettengill (Simon Baker, The Mentallist) and Bud Chantillas (Terence Stamp, Superman II), as well a military robot named "AMEE" (Autonomous Mapping Exploration and Evasion) which has been brought along to guide them through Mars which was a clichéd version of HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). As you guessed it, the mission goes awry when they crash land and they find themselves stranded and fighting for survival. How predictable and unoriginal.Val Kilmer has seen better days and Red Planet was something that he would rather forget. Carrie-Anne Moss was riding high after the success of the mega-blockbuster The Matrix (1999) and this would not have helped her career. Tom Sizemore is more suited to tough guy roles and he looked out of place here. Benjamin Bratt and Simon Baker were just typecast and their characters didn't have anything going for them. Terence Stamp has always been reliable in a majority of his movies, and I strongly felt that he was not at fault here.Red Planet was just boring and uninteresting from start to finish. It could have become interesting or even improve, but the movie just blew every chance. You could be forgiven for thinking that this was another rip off of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) with the similar plot and the artificial robot. Regardless, the end result is poor, and it had nothing going for it. It doesn't even hold a candle to Stanley Kubrick's classic. The ending, while merciful, was also pathetic and it was just tacked on as a band aid solution to finish off the movie.Red Planet was a box office flop that received many dismal reviews from critics and audiences alike. It also cemented a spot as one of the worst movies of 2000. Everything about it was dismal. And not even the cast could redeem the movie. While it didn't put me to sleep, I just couldn't wait for the movie to finish. Save your time and don't waste your money. Red Planet was certainly a forgettable experience.

cinemajesty What "Red Planet" could have been if had been brought to the screen with necessary scientific accuracy. At first glance, the movie seems tightly made with 100 Minutes running time without end crawler. But director Antony Hoffman and screenwriter Chuck Pfarrer give in towards a mediocre entertainment factor. Spaceship arrives at Mars orbit. The Hollywood standard incident occurs with Spaceship having malfunctions. Exploring crew gets stranded on the Mars surface. Then they team members die one by one by accident, hand-to-hand struggle, malfunctioning robot dog attack and bio-hazard insect invasion. Spaceship in orbit gets fixed. One member on Mars surface survives. He gets off the planet by locating a hidden space capsule and stealing the battery from robot initiate rescue probe engines. Spaceship crew of two seals their victory with a kiss. The couple flies back to Earth.Due to the string of a straight forward scene structure, the movie can be enjoyable. Nevertheless every step of the characters' journey in "Red Planet" comes to easy. There is no urgency nor dramatic tension within scenes. The cast plays their parts, but they are not living it on screen. The ingredients have been on the plate to choose from, but the director makes no use of it. Cinematography Peter Suschitzky does only the absolute minimum to convey the visual story with color, light and standard camera movements. Production Designer Owen Paterson has his craft under control, but does not get challenged by the director. So to speak it seems that the studio executives took charge of the production footage and finished it up with two editors in standardized manner to open the movie up for widely ranged target audience, which in the case "Red Planet" did not work out. The movie fell flat at the box office domestically as well as internationally with just approx 33,500,000.00 U.S. Dollars revenue worldwide.This 80,000,000.00 Millions U.S. Dollars production shows in a sense that if a first-time director comes to story-driven feature material after a successful commercial portfolio, then it does not guarantee that a directorial signature can be translated. "Red Planet" could have been directed by anyone, it lacks a director's vision, which challenges the cast in their interactions, even dare to improvise from a mediocre script to surprise the audience instead of sedate them in their comfort zone. The production team of "Red Planet" had it all. Director Antony Hoffmann was unable to make use the values to create an event movie that last in the specter's mind.

Leofwine_draca This is a fairly enjoyable, old-fashioned slice of sci fi escapism which runs through all the old genre clichés without offering up anything you haven't seen before. Released at the box-office at around the same time as Brian De Palma's MISSION TO MARS, for me this is the superior film, although it has to be said that neither are great. Technically proficient, RED PLANET looks and sounds great but is oddly uninvolving. It's kind of like all those old '50s science fiction yarns in which astronauts land on a remote planet, combat and fight all kinds of foes and dangerous situations, and return home. Except the wobbly special effects and spaceships are now replaced with state-of-the-art CGI design and impressive, expensive visuals created by today's top computers.One thing the film has in its favour is that it places emphasis on characterisation over a constant stream of action. This may be why it was a flop with younger audiences. Personally I would prefer the former in terms of good film-making but then again I'm not adverse to the latter, being an undemanding genre fan. The cast is an interesting one with some accomplished performers, although it has to be said that everyone seems to be going through the paces with the exception of Tom Sizemore, an actor who grows on me every time I see him. Here he puts in another edgy, likable turn as a sceptical geneticist. The much-maligned Val Kilmer takes the lead and gives a solid but unspectacular turn as the rugged janitor who inevitably becomes the film's hero. Carrie-Anne Moss is actually very good as the ship's commander, here giving a more in-depth and human performance than that in her breakthrough role. The supporting players Simon Baker and Benjamin Bratt are fine, and there's a small but typically kooky turn from Terence Stamp as a philosophising scientist! The special effects are excellent, but you wouldn't expect anything else from a film which cost this much to make. The CGI is also impressive, looking more realistic than most, especially in the form of a well-designed robot named AMEE who is damaged and reverts to her military programming, leading to some tense cat and mouse games on the planet's surface. In fact this killer robot is one of the film's main foes and figures predominantly in the finale.Being a film set on Mars, there are of course aliens, although not what you would think; rather, these are flesh-eating killer cockroaches who have eaten all the algae on the surface of the planet. Once again they're very well animated and a memorable threat to our survivors. The plot is fairly slow-moving but there are lots of dangerous situations and cliff-hangers, including one of the best "running out of oxygen" scenes I've witnessed in a film, which looks really painful and horrible for the actors. In retrospect, RED PLANET looks remarkable but doesn't offer up anything new to the genre, but then what new films do nowadays? Enjoyable escapism to undemanding sci-fi fans of which I am unashamedly one.

chaos-rampant At its time, all those 13 years ago, the film probably went by on its, for the time, palatable effects on a big screen, decent cast not totally phoning it in and fairly simple story of Martian exploration. Watching it now is to get the sense that in another 13 years it will be looked back as amusedly as It - Terror from Outer Space or any number of those 'guys in a tin can pretend to fly in space' sci-fi films of the 50's.It's truly bad. The story is as silly now as it was then, the science and technology as ludicrous (a robot with ninja moves!), the performances as theatrical. But what really has sunk it, I think, is the handling of cinematic space.Films set in space only bring to the fore, with more clarity than usual films, cinematic space as the main anchor of a story-world. 2001 got right a set of notions about the gravity of things in space, the viewing gravity that creates immersion, so every extravagant thing down the road was rooted in our first having been transported to space. I'm eagerly anticipating Gravity as the new template in this field.Here everything feels phony.An unfortunate contrast with the closing theme, so to speak, which is how god, what we call god, is the willingness to not give up, on close ones and otherwise, and this willingness is nothing else than not losing track/sight of the presence of another human being in space, a matter of persisting vision. When the female captain in the end hurls herself from the main vessel, attached to merely a chord, to recover the sole unconscious survivor, this should have been a powerful moment to capture this commitment, had we been rooted as firmly as they are.