Here's the thing about "Red Planet:" once you get over the fact that it's an impossibly absurd and insane premise, even by sci-
fi standards, it's not that bad of a movie. Like all good sci-
fi, the lesson is not really about the future, it's about the present. Specifically, it's a pleas for environmental sustainability. In "Red Planet," the Earth of the future has been overpopulated and polluted to the point that the human race is in danger of wiping itself out. So, since the entire world had known about this for quite a while but never bothered to actually institute any social policies that could save the planet, it was decided by the world's governments (ha! the UN?) to start blasting big clumps of algae at Mars in the hopes that it would turn into an atmosphere capable of supporting life. The small cast of "Red Planet" is some specialty crew sent on a mission to make sure
everything's in good blooming order up there.
There are eight crew members, led by the
hardass captain,
Trinity err... Carrie Ann Moss? Our hero, Val
Kilmer, plays Gallagher, not the one you're thinking of though:
He's basically the ship's mechanic. Like all strong women commanding officers in sci-
fi, Carrie Ann Moss sleeps with
Kilmer's character with little prompting. When an inconvenient solar flare fucks up the
mothership, everybody but Trinity bails in their little launch ship to go down to the hopefully now partially habitable Mars surface. Trinity manages not to die, but just about everyone else will (spoiler alert). So the old philosopher with no real purpose on the space mission gets fucked up in the landing and croaks soon after. Everyone else is freaking out because they've got to get to this distant base but they're running out of air. Also, all that algae that was supposed to be making a new atmosphere is missing. Stuck on Mars with little hope of breathing for long. That's trouble. For some unexplained reason, two of the crew members hate each other and one of them pushes the other, I forget which, off a cliff. Now they get to the base, but
whaaaa? It's all shredded. Like some big paranormal event came through and ripped it pieces. All the air's gone. All the food's gone. They're in some deep shit. Their air is no critically low and they start suffocating in their suits. Then, in the biggest leap of plot I've seen in a long time,
Kilmer takes his mask off and he can breathe despite the lack of algae or other materials that might give them air.
Okay, stop to consider that. They can breathe but it's still a lifeless 'red planet.' So now they've got to figure out how to get back. They decide that they're going to use this old soviet rocket that's stuck there a couple miles away. They start making their way there and almost freeze to death at night. Some big storm rolls through. Also,
Kilmer's pet robot goes berserk and is skillfully hunting and trying to kill them. It gets the bad guy. Ugh... There's so much to tell!
So we're down to two of the astronauts trying to get to the
cosmonautical rocket.
Kilmer and
fate's enemy Tom Sizemore, when all of a sudden, we see the algae (hooray!) being devoured by a swarm of space roaches that obviously at their base and end up eating Tom
Sizemore (
booo!). This is a strange interpretation of Martians. They're like bugs that apparently love to eat everything that's not the inorganic surface of Mars. But they're flammable. Oh, and they somehow excrete oxygen which is why the cast can breathe without space suits. There's a showdown between the robot,
Kilmer and the bugs.
Kilmer blasts off. Earth is far from saved.
This actually was not that good of a movie now that I've written this all out.
