Rating: 
Summary: It's not as bad as it seems (with apologies to M. Twain)
Review: Is this REALLY the worst film some of you have seen? I think not, even limiting the field to sci-fi of the last ten years. Remember Alien3? Godzilla? Armageddon? Phantom Menace? Lost in Space? Pitch Black? There's some pretty tough competition out there. True, it's not a great film. True, the characters and dialog are pretty weak, but has anyone seen 2001 lately? A truly great film, but face it, Dave Bowman is no Hamlet. As an obvious homage to 2001, M2M captures Kubrick's detached, depersonalized style fairly well. Why else would DePalma cast Jerry O'Connell, with his striking resemblance to Charlie McCarthy, Edgar Bergen's dummy? M2M clearly mimics 2001's pacing, as well. In the earlier film. we jump from prehominoid earth to lunar excavation sites to earth-orbitting space stations to Jupiter to Bowman's retirement home to infinity to infancy. Whew! M2M's a tight little tale by comparison. The most refreshing aspect of M2M, however, is its reliance on sets and models. Compare to Phantom Menace and Godzilla, which look like cheesy video games throughout. DePalma uses computer graphics judiciously (excluding the final, rather silly scenes), but the realism of the Martian base could only be created with a craftsperson's attention to dirt, metal, and paint. This technology worked wonders for cinema's three best sci-fi films (2001, Star Wars, and Bladerunner), and it continues to pack a punch. So let's be honest. M2M is not a great film, but the bar is so much lower for sci-fi movies that it is a perfectly acceptable film.
Rating:
Summary: GREAT SCENERY. BUT MARS MOVIE COULD HAVE BEEN BETTER
Review: The story and screenplay can be blamed on writers Lowell Cannon (story) and Jim Thomas. Their plot of MISSION TO MARS is about a rescue mission to find out what happened to a crew of astronauts that successfully landed on Mars, then suddenly disappeared. But in its concept, the movie's story has whiskders: it is a dumbed down, cut-and-paste assembly of Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey," Spielberg's "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," sprinkled with a little Robinson Crusoe thrown in. Indeed, diagnostic is that the best stuff takes place BEFORE the rescue mission even reaches Mars. The ending climax, therefore, is made to be anticlimactic! On top of this, the actors are burdened with banal, meaningless dialogue further adding to the movie's generic feel (example: "Are you sure you want to do this?"/"I'm not sure of anything anymore." ... Wow, how "original"). The cast includes Gary Sinise, Don Cheadle and Tim Robbins who never seems to take the movie very seriously. It is almost as if they were trusting director Brian De Palma to make everything come together in the editing room. Wrong! To some extent in his rendering of this $100K (where did it all go?) MISSION TO MARS, De Palma showed nerve - while saving LOTS of money - by totally skipping the usual shots of spaceship blastoffs and landings. The audience is left to imgaine how the various space voyagers got into outer space. Also, he completely bypassed the transition from the astronauts' backyard family barbecue in the year 2020 (seems just like 2001) to hurtling towards Mars. He cuts away before each departure, then shows the spacecraft either on its way to or on one of Mars's rusty deserts. Once on Mars, title cards tell us how much time has elapsed [title cards are lots cheaper than FX!]. Eventhough MISSION TO MARS is often realistic, sorry guys but it blazes no new cinematic trails (at risk of mixing metaphors). On the plus side, this flick is more picturesque, efficient, and technically more convincing than many of its earlier counterparts. Seemingly reversing myself, its avoidance of CHEAP whiz-bangs is a plus, in a limited sense. Compared to the way overdone "Armageddon," the plainness of MISSION TO MARS is a pleasure. Most of MISSION TO MARS is about the rescue mission. The second NASA team of astronauts to Mars is reluctantly sent to retrieve the unconfirmed sole survivor (of four) from the first Mars mission that was unexpectedly wiped out. The second team nearly fails to arrive for rescuing their possibly stranded buddy, and also to possibly find out what Mars is all about. The claustrophobia of the astronauts in close quarters is artistically contrasted with the vastness of the often deadly vacuum outside their spaceship. Some excellent effects are presented to us when co-commander Tim Robbins, and eventually the others, hover in zero gravity or gas propel themselves outside their ship to repair damage done by meteorites. At its best, the scale and pacing and imagery remind us of "2001: A Space Odyssey." Thanks to De Palma deciding a lot of the action to unfold in silence, he gives us a feel for the remoteness and emptiness of space. Realistically, space travel is mostly long periods of uneventful floating after the blastoff. At risk of giving the movie's big finale away, I must say it is a silly montage of computer-generated special effects which accompanies a touchy-feely revisionist evolutionary theory of life. Evidently, MISSION TO MARS was written with impressionable 10-year-olds in mind. People who're committed to Creationism won't be nuts about the movie's big "revelation." In fact , if that's what evolution is all about (our evolutionary ancestors were UFO driving, bug eyed aliens who came from Mars) I'll take Creationism! But then again, science fiction and religion have never gotten along THAT well, anyhow. By the way, MISSION TO MARS was produced under NASA's new Space Act Agreement for film and TV. This allows filmmakers to use the Kennedy Space Center for locations and shoot the NASA logo. Taking advantage of the U.S. taxpayers' largesse, that added a realistic look to the spacesuits and equipment used in the film. But, hey folks, these touches of realism couldn't rescue this slow-paced movie to nowhere.
Rating: 
Summary: Very good - a work of conviction!
Review: I got this on "impulse" quickly and did not read the reviews. Woe was me - I read them later and tried to can the order, expecting a real turkey. How wrong I was. I realize that the opening shots of the film are a little domestic, but in these scenes and in the remainder of the film I started to develop a broad suspicion which was later confirmed towards the end. Brian DePalmer did not like "Aliens", nor did he like "Psycho", or "Event horizon"... and naturally, the critics do not now like Mr DePalmer! These films, whose mere mention makes me feel a bit queasy, are so distant from this film, I'm not surprised that this effort has attracted considerable fire. Mr DePalma has cut across convention and followed his instincts, and the result is very good indeed! What De-Palmer has done is remarkable from several points of view. He has stuck to realistic physics - and I would be quite confident about maintaining this in spite of comments everywhere to the contrary - dialogue I would really want to believe in (assuming that the future is NOT some nightmare fusion between Macdonalds in space and the Bates Motel, in which case, you can count me outa here anyway), and observations about character and goodness that I would be very hopeful for and encouraged by. The basic premise of the film is not so crazy at all, and is far, far more believable than the almost insane backdrop of ideas behind 2001. (having said that I guess I've really torn it now) The music was the biggest surprise. My wife noticed this immediately, and she does not always take such sharp notice as I tend to. This score is far, far better than anything I have heard ouside of the debussy / Vaughan Williams / Delius grouping, and it is a great piece of work in it's own right. The special effects are very well worked out, again, don't really violate physics or descend into a floorless mysticism, which has bothered me about a few recent films. To more mundane matters. The DVD is organised very well, and my kids very much appreciated the extras, which include quite detailed expalnations of set construction and design. Some of this was really breathtaking. I think I must have just laughed and said something like, "wow.. no WAY could I do that!" As my kids are really interested in filming anyway, this section was a completely unexpected bonus.
Rating: 
Summary: A very human experience
Review: Not being a SciFi fan, I got this film thanks to a friend's recommendation (Thanks, Joe!), and to my surprise I found "Mission to Mars" a sound concept for the eternal questions of What is out there, Where did we come from, Is there senisble life on other planets etc. This is a beautifully drawn little story one mught tell to children. But the special effects and the overall human qualities and motivations are a breath of fresh air. This is not just another noisy war of the worlds with gooey monsters and wacko aliens. This little movie sings. Recommended.
Rating: 
Summary: Contact and 2001 wannabe burns up on re-entry (mild spoiler)
Review: I rented this movie and boy was I glad I did. Not because I got to watch it, but because I avoided buying it. This film suffers from a serious identity crisis. It is too intelligent and slow paced to be an action sci-fi film, yet the script is too ham-fisted for brainiac movie viewers to sit through without squirming or throwing popcorn at the TV. It moves at the glacier's pace of a 2001: A Space Odyssey or Silent Running, which is not necessarily a bad thing if the script is worthwhile (it worked OK in Contact, which I think this film aspired to be). But the script sails thoroughly charted territory with its "the answers to man's origin lie in space" theme, and sadly doesn't improve on the existing body of work with a similar plot. Worse, the movie is horrible from a character interaction point of view. The characters are one-dimensional. The dialogue is inexcusable. Critical high-tech or personal background information is presented in painfully contrived conversations, where you have these big-brained scientists who have worked together for 12 years having unrealistic conversations like, "You're the best pilot out there and you trained 12 intense years for this mission. Heck, you designed the program. If your wife hadn't died tragically before your eyes, you'd be going on this mission instead of me." I found these canned information-packed discussions between people who all already KNOW this information to be more annoying than if they would have just included a booklet entitled, "Everything You Need to Know Before Watching This Movie." Another bad script example: When the stranded astronaut is told by the newly arrived rescue crew simply that one of their crewmembers "didn't make it" with no mention of the hardships the crew underwent to reach Mars, he just says "Oh my God!" and cries. He doesn't ask any questions, he just accepts that three people got to Mars alive and one died during what, at this point, he believes to have been a routine mission. It would be as if three of your four family members arrived at the airport for Thanksgiving and when you asked "Where's dad?" they said, "We're sorry son. He died on the way," and you just left it at that. I realize the movie was already getting painful to sit through, but couldn't they have added a single line like, "We had some difficulties on the trip which we will explain later. But first..." As if the dialogue isn't hard enough to sit through, the film has no real enemy and the payoff -- which is supposed to be stirring and thought-provoking -- is ludicrous. It's going to REALLY tick off hardcore creationists, and leave the rest of us saying, "yeah, right." While the understated special effects -- the ones you don't notice, like the ships and the martian surface, etc. -- are really fantastically well done, the big eye-popping money shots are quite frankly pretty silly. Even if you don't agree with me that, for example, the "vortex" is downright stupid looking, it's hard to argue against its utter impracticality as an automated defense system. Wouldn't scanners and lasers have been more likely than a spinning, semi-sentient wind/rock thingy? I mean, we're talking billion-year-old automated sequences left behind to accomodate life forms whose composition couldn't be anticipated by the system designers. I think these brilliant Martian minds would have used Operational Risk Management and chosen to build systems that were the most efficient and presented the least risk of failure. Why would, for example, you design an unsupervised spaceship launch sequence that requires the passenger to be sucked into a hovering spaceship then launched through an exploding/collapsing/burning hangar structure? Wouldn't moving catwalks and a nice retractable door present a lot less chance for catastrophe with your precious, one-shot-in-a-billion-years payload? In spite of the unrealistic "gee whiz" sequences, the movie uses realistic time spans. While a respectable idea, this destroys any sense of tension ("He's stuck down there with a limited amount of power, oxygen and water! We've got to hurry and plan so we can launch a rescue mission in a year!") and left me confused about the passage of time. I realize not everybody scrutinizes movies the way I do. But if you're the type of person who says, "I don't watch movies to think!" you're going to hate this movie anyway (the "action" sequences all happen in slow motion weightlessness, like watching the evil scientist chase Bugs Bunny after they've both huffed ether). So I give this dog two stars. One star for the "lesser" special effects, and one for the extras on the DVD (though some are repetitive). A definite Saturday night, shelves-are-empty rental choice.
Rating:
Summary: Hokey, pokey
Review: There's two ways to view M2M: either as a serious drama about a rescue mission to Mars; or as a space comedy. The special effects may be excellent, but the plot and acting are dubious. There's no creativity in the story. The opening is a rip-off of Apollo 13, and the talking computer is reminiscent of 2001: Space Odyssey. I was so taken back by how horrible this movie was I almost turned it off midway through. But I couldn't help but find myself laughing out loud. If I were to rate the movie as a drama, I would give it zero stars. If I were to rate it as a comedy, I'd give it about four stars, hence the two star rating I give it overall. If you you want a good laugh, this movie is better as a rental, don't waste your money buying it.
Rating:
Summary: Great visual effects
Review: Don't get me wrong, Mission to Mars is not Oscar worthy material. But if you watch this movie the whole way through then you will leave with a feeling of awe and wonder. The special effects are just downright wonderful. If you can forget for just 1 second that the backgrounds and monsters are not real then the movie is a success. You start thinking, "maybe that is what happened" or "maybe that will happen." The acting is pretty good even though it could have been better considering who was in it. I also thought that adding a twist to one of the characters in the movie about 1/2 way through was ingenious. I do have to admit that when I rented Mission to Mars I was not giving it a chance to be half way decent because of it's PG rating. I thought that a space movie that's rated PG just can't be good. Well I was wrong. It could easily have been PG-13. If you want to be left in awe and in the mood for a space movie that is good for a change then rent Mission to Mars. 4 Stars
Rating: 
Summary: Earth to DePalma - Your Film Stinks.
Review: DePalma assembled a capable cast for his space adventure, and he had some great people working behind the camera for him. Some of the film looks great. It really does. The set design, the cinematography, the gadgets, the special effects are all very good- even impressive. Mars the planet looked like it should in a big budget science fiction movie. The planets surface looked extremely believable and a galaxy away from such campy trash of the '50's like Angry Red Plant. But the film winds up being a dolled up corny old space movie from the 1950's. We meet all the main characters at a big party in the year 2020, as most are about to embark on one of the most exciting missions of all time-humans landing on Mars. Without wasting much time we find out that Jim McConnell ( Gary Sinise) was removed from the Mars Landing crew when his astronaut wife, Maggie (Kim Delaney in a couple of flashbacks) became ill and passed away. He had dreamed of going, but he couldn't train hard for the mission as his wife died. He dropped out of the running. His good friend Luke Graham ( Don Cheadle) was given the mission in his place (even though he would have to leave his wife and child behind for at least two years). Luke is part of a crew that includes a Russian couple and an overachiever. Woody (Tim Robbins) and Terry (Connie Neilsen) are a modern married and still randy couple who along with Phil Ohlmeyer (Jerry O'Conell) a young space enginerring whiz, Jim (Sinise) and others will be on the International Space Station that's somewhere between Earth and Mars. The crew on Mars investigate a strange reading on the surface that seems to indicate the presence or water. A mountain range becomes a strange living whirlwind which attacks the crew. It seems they all have perished. But wait, there's a transmission from Luke which gives some hope he might still be alive. Jim, Woody, Terry and Phil take one of those one in a thousand chances to try and find their friend and find out what has happened on the surface of Mars. What happens is almost exactly what you expect if you have seen any science fiction movies or t.v. movies in the last 50 years. There are three set pieces in the film. 1) The initial attack on the planet surface, which you've seen most of if you remember the trailer for the film. We get to this scene pretty quickly since there is not a long space camp training sequence, or even a blasting off into space sequence. We pretty much move from Earth to Mars within a couple of scenes at the beginning of the movie. 2) An extended scene in which something goes terribly wrong when the rescue team attempts to get to the planet's surface. This is where the film really lost me since some, only in the movie's logic, is employed to get a main character in trouble and then to make his rescue impossible (or so it seems). When I can outsmart guys from NASA who are supposed to be smart about space stuff, we know the film has a sudden case of the convenient stupids. During an earlier part of this sequence a prominently displayed space package of Dr. Pepper is used to solve one of the big problems the space crew is having. Talk about your crass commercialism. I was preparing myself for a cameo in which Bill Cosby sings the praises of Jello. Now it might be to the point that product placement in movies is so commonplace that it doesn't stick out like a sore thumb in every movie... but it certainly does in this one. The idea that a soda would be packaged in a colorful package with a logo is pretty ridiculous. Oh my god NASA wants to put 1,000 packages of Dr. Pepper together for their Mission to Mars.... we better make sure we put fancy labels on them... marketing, marketing arketing. (And if there were other brands of soda being consumed they apparantly didn't have fancy labels. Hmm soda in zero gravity? 3) The attempted exciting climax of the film. One of the special effects during the climax is very cartoonish and phony, which doesn't detract us away from this winds up beings a combination rip off of The Abyss and Close Encounters with a little StarGate thrown in. There's a puzzle that needs to be solved during this sequence. How they come to the conclusion of what they are looking for is one of those so bad it's fall on the floor stupid laugh out loud time. Too bad it's a rather short scene. Even really bad the film would have been more fun. Then the film is suddenly over. What? That's it'? That's all we get? DePalma doesn't even have a hand suddenly spring up from a rocky grave (Carrie) to give us a big of a jolt? Nope. Chris Jarmick Author with Serena F. Holder of The Glass Cocoon --a steamy cyber thriller available end of January 2001.
Rating:
Summary: Newton spins in his grave
Review: Since this flick was highly touted as approved by NASA scientists the following sequence must be addressed: Tim Robbin is receding in space, his rocket pack fuel expended. His wife goes to rescue him using uo more than half of her fuel. She turns off her rocketpack AND THEN STOPS MOVING TOWARDS ROBBINS. Later she magically has enough fuel to return to her starting point. This is as ludicrous as the infamous scene in "Rocket Ship X-M" where the ship stops in space between the Earth and the moon when it's engines quit. What balderdash. I have decided to recommend this movie. This is one of the best possible movies you can rent for an MST3K party! Another plus to this movie is that, like Malick's "The Thin Red Line", when you see a positive review of it on these pages you know you are reading a review from a film student. To those who actually work for a living and earn their own money (and sadly too often spend it sending a child to college to study film) save it. Unless you like MST3K parties.
Rating:
Summary: A good movie, yet is drags a little. 3 1/2 stars.
Review: Mission To Mars tells the story of the first man mission to Mars in 2020. The first team that is sent to Mars finds what they think is water on Mars yet something happens while they are investigating. The second Mars team leaves earlier as a rescue mission to find any survivors from what went wrong. What they find is the link to life on Earth is actually from Mars. Mission To Mars is a very realistic story first with the mission and what they find which is a possible real life link to our life here. It has great acting and special effects. The only thing is that it seems like that its much longer than it really is because each scene is played out in a slow way, thats ok though cause its a great movie. The other thing is that its not a real violent movie because thats not what kind of movie it is, its more like an entertaing documentary and is accesible to all ages. I think thats why some people think this movie isn't all that great, which it is. Rated PG for mild violence and mild profanity.
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