Red Planet opens from the premise that, by 2025, humanity is actively preparing to populate Mars — a setup that feels oddly hopeful for a film rooted in an Earth ravaged by pollution. The movie, now a quarter-century old, treats Martian settlement as practical engineering rather than a billionaire’s fever dream. It wasn’t the only year-2000 take on Mars: earlier that year, Brian De Palma released what became his last major-studio picture, Mission to Mars, which imagines a less desperate near future. Together those two films outgrossed Space Cowboys worldwide — and they did it without Clint Eastwood’s famously frugal instincts. Even at their best, both pictures help explain why Mars grew into an oddly fraught setting for movies in the years that followed.
Despite decades of robotic probes and intense study, Mars remains beyond routine human reach — yet it’s long been the obvious next frontier in speculative space travel. Both Mission to Mars and especially Red Planet nostalgically echo 1950s sci‑fi: astronauts head to the Red Planet only to encounter disaster, mystery, or strange life. Each film begins with a certain deliberate awkwardness intended to channel older-era melodrama: De Palma’s film opens with a painfully earnest barbecue scene, while Red Planet begins with Commander Kate Bowman (Carrie‑Anne Moss) narrating in a tone so stilted it reads like a computer prompt.
That voiceover doesn’t endure. After Bowman haltingly introduces her team — played by Val Kilmer, Tom Sizemore, Benjamin Bratt, Simon Baker, and Terence Stamp — and explains their mission to investigate why a terraforming effort using atmosphere-producing algae has stalled, the plot settles into a series of practical, well-executed space-problem beats. When their mothership is crippled, Bowman keeps it aloft while sending a landing craft down. The landing module is damaged, the surface base has been destroyed, communications falter, and the bigger ship will decay from orbit with only 31 hours on the clock.
Image: Warner Bros.When two films on the same subject release in a single year, they can be wildly divergent (think Antz versus A Bug’s Life). That split doesn’t quite apply here: both Mars pictures hinge on catastrophic accidents that strand crews and force improvised landings. De Palma stages one unforgettable, extended sequence in which a meteor storm rips through a ship, compelling the crew to abandon it and descend in a smaller module — his camerawork is fluid and inventive in a way Red Planet rarely matches. Yet once De Palma’s team reaches the surface, his film drifts into earnest metaphysical territory, unspooling a speculative origin story that tips into earnest hokum (the emotional peak practically plays like a high-concept slideshow).
That kind of grand revelation feels less persuasive now because Mars occupies an odd cultural place: it’s a nearby world we can glimpse with the naked eye and one we’ve studied extensively. The notion that it harbors universe‑shaping secrets reads as quaint compared with the plausibility of other cinematic flights of fancy — for instance, the more ambitious speculative leaps made in Interstellar.
On balance, Red Planet is the more pragmatic picture of the two. Its retro pulp sensibility and willingness to favor engineering complications over cosmic mysticism will please genre devotees, even if mainstream audiences in 2000 — perhaps hoping for something as flashy as Independence Day or as mythic as Star Wars — found it too middling. The presence of Carrie‑Anne Moss, fresh off the cultural earthquake of The Matrix, only made expectations harder to meet.
When the film does turn toward the more fantastic in its final act, it stumbles at sustaining suspense and at making character losses feel consequential — too many fates are telegraphed in advance. Still, for long stretches Red Planet functions well as a taut survival picture: Moss and Kilmer give engaging performances, the production values are solid, and the film sprinkes in nice touches — a morally ambiguous robot and unsettling Martian organisms among them. Director Antony Hoffman composes striking vistas and keeps the story moving with a briskness that recalls older, no-nonsense space adventures.
Image: Warner Bros.Hoffman never directed another feature, and it’s unfair that the movie’s disappointing box-office take is often laid at his feet — the Mars curse persisted long after 2000. John Carpenter’s Ghosts of Mars flopped in 2001 but later gained a cult audience, and Disney’s Mars Needs Moms and John Carter together cost the studio hundreds of millions. It wasn’t until Ridley Scott’s The Martian in 2015 that a straight, scientifically minded Mars survival story broke through commercially — a reminder that realistic astronaut dramas can succeed when they weight human ingenuity over mysticism.
There’s an agreeable old‑school quality to Red Planet: it imagines a 2025 that’s technologically capable but still messy, improvised, and prone to failure. It doesn’t demystify Mars completely, but it does suggest that colonizing another planet will be more grind than glorious escape — a sobering counterpoint to the idea of Mars as a tidy off‑ramp for Earth’s problems.
Source: Polygon
