Red Planet
 (2000)
review by Head CheezeBoo! 

Red Planet is the OTHER Mars movie to come out in 2000, after Brian Depalma's car wreck of a film Mission To Mars. While Red Planet will probably never usurp Citizen Kane as greatest motion picture of all time, it is certainly much better than the masturbatory piece of stool that was M2M(it's tagline here in the states, and coincidentally the title of a magazine specialising in homo-erotic sex toys and bondage gear.). If this first paragraph makes one think that this is high praise for Red Planet, think again. Colon Cancer is better than Mission to Mars, so Red Planet need only keep one awake to qualify as a better film, and it suceeds on this most primal level.

The story is irrelevant, but in short a bunch of sterotypical spacemen are sent to Mars to check in on some automated Terraforming stations that promise to make the planet habitable for humans (and thus give us a new planet to destroy). Packaged aboard the ship are a bunch of beautiful people who look nothing like the geeks that real astronauts are, including Val Kilmer as a sort of Space Janitor (his character fixes..... things), Carrie Anne Moss as the tough as nails (in so much as an anorexic super-model can be) Captain, Benjamin Bratt as the angry co-pilot, and Terrence Stamp as a scientist who says a lot of metaphysical shit and dies ten minutes into the movie, a'la Brando in Superman, but for less money. Also along for the ride are a British guy who proudly carries on the proud Hollywood tradition that states that anyone with an English accent must be twitchy, nervous, and ultimately a back-stabbing opportunist. American cinema apparently still thinks we are in the throes of the revolutionary war. Oh, yeah, I almost forgot Tom Sizemore portrays a botanist-as-channeled-by a mafioso ("Hey, lookit dat fuckin moss on da stone. Wot da fuck? Fuggedaboutit!) in one of the most unitentionally hilarious casting mistakes of all time. A better choice would have been a small stone or the skeleton of a Rhesus monkey.

Anyway, everything that can go wrong does and the crew is stranded on Mars after a crash landing that combines the FX wizardy of Star Wars with the realism that is Pong and they soon realize that there IS life on Mars after all!

Toss in a malfunctioning robot named AMY who was brought along for no other apparent reason than her ability to turn into a vicious killing machine with the slightest tap to the cranium and Red Planet proves that movies about Mars should be shot into space along with their cast and crew.

As far as DVD extras go, you get the obligatory filler, but one can't imagine wanting more than an aspirin after watching this rubbish.