On R List of Movie Reviews

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Red Planet (2000)

Rate: 3
Viewed: 10/21

RedPl
10/21: "I, uh...I really hate this planet. Fuck this planet."

My sentiment, exactly. So, why are these guys there? A major box-office disaster, Red Planet is a boring sci-fi picture that's low in intelligence. Only Val Kilmer saves it from earning a potential '1' from me. Then again, what is he doing in this turkey? I thought Val was a serious actor.

The dialogue during the first forty minutes is hard to get into; nothing makes sense. By the time the five guys are on Mars, the movie starts to improve, bringing me back into the fold. From there on, I'm on a roller coaster ride of ups and downs. By the time Val is all alone, it's been bearable until the end.

Of course, nothing shown in Red Planet is remotely possible. For starters, Mars is approximately fifty million miles farther from the sun than Earth which translates to less sunlight, hence colder environment. In other words, the average temperature on Mars is -81°F. So, a permanent settlement for humans there? Impossible. Okay, maybe it's the summer which means up to 70°F during the day, yet it'll sink to -100°F at night. At one point in the film, the temperature read -51°F, but nobody seemed to struggle.

I'm aware that the distance for one kilometer is 0.62 of a mile. Therefore, 100 km is 62 miles. Are the filmmakers telling me that people are capable of walking this far in nineteen hours with no food or water? Uh...okay. I actually thought they planned to skip because gravity on Mars is a little more than one-third of Earth's gravity. Later, Bowman asked for a line to reach Gallagher in outer space which is 43 km (27 miles) apart. I wondered why in the world a spaceship would bring something this long. From an actual visual standpoint, it can't be more than one mile.

I'll say Red Planet is a good-looking movie, but when there's action, the quality of special effects drops a lot. Having AMEE on board is an overkill because what the characters are going through is more than enough. To make matters worse, it's been done already with HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Back to AMEE, I'm quite sure Gallagher was trained to deal with all conceivable situations, so why not have an option on his armpad to neutralize the stupid robot immediately? By the way, if Burchenal has a Ph.D. in genetics, then he should please enlighten me in what P stands for in the world of DNA nucleotides.

All in all, Red Planet would've been perfect for 1950, but filmmaking had already advanced fifty years since then.