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| Watched Red Planet. HATED IT. (long, full of hate) by Bill Dungsroman 03/10/2003, 4:48pm PST | ||||
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| Why did I watch this movie? I mean, I knew it was going to suck. The ads did a very capable job of revealing how stupid this movie is, without doubt. The ads plainly show that the plot of this film is that in the future, a group of Earthlings go to Mars and get killed by their own robot. All seeing the film did was modify that to have the Earthlings be plucky because we had squandered all of our natural resources by then (now there’s an original premise), it’s only a couple hundred years into the future, and that Mars has aliens who are barely even secondary to the plot, which was still more-or-less them getting killed by their own robot. No, I watched this stupid film for the fucking flimsiest of reasons: the killer robot’s name was A.M.E.E., short for what-fucking-ever, but homonymous with my ex-fiancé’s name. That was enough for me. So I watched it on cable purely out of fulfilling some pathetic passive-aggressive urge, and I got what I deserved for it.
Maybe if the film immediately opened with AMEE slaughtering humans, I could have plead ignorance to the rest of the hack job this fucking mess turned out to be. But I have no excuse, since instead it opened with a fucking voice-over by Carrie-Ann Moss, the semi-hot but seriously funny-looking actress riding the vestiges of buzz she garnered by somehow starring in The Matrix. Matrix 2 had better come out soon for her sake; like a latter-day female Mark Hamill, her Big Break is pretty much all she’s got (buoyed somewhat by hanging around in Blade 1, and getting to act next to Stephen Dorff, which helps anyone’s credibility as an actor). The voice-over explains the tired-ass premise of Earth using up its natural resources, yet still being able to build a big-ass spaceship capable of reaching Mars in a relatively short period of time. Fine, whatever, but then Moss’ voice-over has to introduce each crew member and explain their character to us (isn’t that what the fucking film and its story are for?), with hackneyed shit like “such-and-such is the soul of our crew,†simply because Terence Stamp’s character is religious (because in the future, as usual, nobody is religious). Nigger, please. Plus, the characters are straight out of Clichéville: Val Kilmer as the Quirky (but not quirky enough) Main Character, Stamp as the Older Peaceful Religious Dude, Benjamin Bratt (why is he famous?) as the Brusk Overconfident Ladies Man, Moss as the Tough-But-Feminine female Captain, the increasingly-annoying Tom Sizemore as Tom Sizemore (since, I assume, Steve Buscemi was already in Armageddon), and some nameless fag as the Last-Second Nervous Replacement, which is only allowed in films about the Apollo 13 mission, since Weigart really was one. The first part of the film shows the journey out to Mars, which is obviously long, and the film accurately portrays how skull-numbingly boring that would be. Bratt gets video email from random whores, and makes some amazingly unfunny joke about the number of hits his personal site got compared to the nameless fag’s site. Bratt got way more, see, and most of TNF’s were from his mother. HA HA MAMA JOKE. Any idiot at this point knows that these two will either have a confrontation or a bonding later in the film. Sizemore uses the chem lab to make hooch, and Moss gives him a hard time at first (she says “How would the taxpayers feel if they knew you were using billion-dollar equipment to get drunk?†or whatever trite nonsense we’ve all heard a million times before), but then demurs and they all get drunk and ask Stamp about religion. Could this film be any more fucking generic? Sizemore is critical of religion, because Sizemore’s characters will always be that way, forever. TNF passes out. How cute! Ugh. Evidently, prior to the manned mission, Earth sent all these unmanned algae bombs to convert Mars’ atmosphere to breathable overnight (by astronomical terms). Yeah, whatever. So when Our Heroes arrive at Mars, there’s supposed to be a breathable atmosphere and a pre-fab home for them. Just like humans: build a new place to live, and the first thing we do is put a trailer park on it. Anyway, guess what? The algae is all gone, and the pre-fab home is trashed. That in itself would have made for an intriguing mystery, but the filmmakers weren’t trying for that, they wanted to beat us over the head with lame attempts at suspense. The mystery gets second billing at best; mostly, it’s ignored. So, prior to that, their ship hits some radiation burst and fries its systems. Everyone runs for a protective “safe zone†except Captain Moss, who orders Bratt to leave her at the helm, while she stays and suffers no ill effects even though flames or something (it’s supposed to be radiation, but radiation is invisible, and that’s not scary enough for the dipshits who made this film) are shooting through the ship. So why did Bratt have to leave? Then, when the crew has to go down to the surface, they have to in some kind of escape pod, and naturally it’s messed up somehow so someone has to manually eject it. What the fuck kind of stupid fucking escape pod can fail in such a way that a manual eject only by someone staying on the ship is even possible at that point? Captain Moss remains on board thanks to that contrivance. Guess what? The landing is fucked, so they have to manually land it. Bratt struggles to reach the controls in a bit reminiscent of Star Trek, and then lands the pod poorly (I’ve always appreciated those struggling-to-grasp-the-controls bits, since they somehow can maneuver the sticks freely after finally reaching them, like simply grasping them negates the G-forces or whatever that made getting to them so difficult). Stamp gets hurt, so they just sort of leave him behind without so much as a Seeya. (“See, Terence,†the director must have explained, “your character gets hurt when you land, and then you just announce it and the audience infers that you die sometime later, when Carrie-Ann sees you from orbit.â€). As a side note, Stamp’s injury was a ruptured spleen, and although that’s the most common critical internal soft tissue impact injury, it seems highly unlikely Stamp would have sustained a splenic rupture, given how they were strapped into the pod. Then TNF throws Bratt off a really high cliff; finally, humor. TNF tried for bonding, was rebuffed by Bratt, and it turned confrontational. Way to go, guys. I thought a robot was supposed to kill everyone. There are only four people left at this point. And three of them are about to die from lack of oxygen, except of course they don’t. There’s somehow air on Mars! Who cares? Next, the astronauts have to figure out a way to radio Moss (since the escape pod either doesn’t have a radio –which is patently fucking stupid – or they don’t care to hike back for it – which is also patently fucking stupid), and the pre-fab’s is trashed along with the rest of it. So they go and find the little lander from the early 90’s, the one that looks like the illegitimate love child of an Erector set and a Lego set. Somehow they get it to work, although why a dinky little lander would come equipped with a microphone for Kilmer to speak to Moss with is beyond me. Moss just finished dealing with her own illogical problems, though. The ship caught fire again, and she has to strap into a safety chair and pop an emergency hatch to let the oxygen and thus the fire shoot out into space, the only physically logical solution I saw in the entire movie. But, of course, this unprotected chair has to be directly across from the emergency hatch, so that all the flames and pens and shit fly right in front of her face as they go out. And for no apparent reason, the chair detaches from the wall, except for a safety line, so that she hangs directly in front of the hatch opening. Who built this fucking ship? Ah, finally the robot, damaged due to the crash and programmed by Marines (why would you need a military robot for a colonizing mission of a supposedly lifeless-but-for-algae planet?), goes nuts and starts killing people. Er, I mean wounding them. Yes, the super killer jarhead robot runs up to Sizemore, knocks him flat, sends the other guys flying through the “low gravity†of Mars (yeah, right), and then carefully and purposely breaks one of his ribs. “Guerilla tactics,†Kilmer explains. “Injuring one of the group slows them down.†Yeah, Val, but the fucking thing can toss you guys around like rag dolls, why doesn’t it just decapitate you all with its fruity spinning feet and be done with it? You aren’t armed, you have nowhere to hide or escape to. Get the fuck out of here, it’s going to wound one of you and then disappear for hours, and attack again during the day? What kind of stupid fucking guerrillas were AMEE modeled after? That thing should be wearing Val’s funny elbow as a codpiece with Sizemore’s face stretched over its head like a doo-rag. I assume it killed TNF at some point (I had to do something, piss or something, and I missed it). At least I hope so, or else its Kill Count would be absolute zero. Finally, AMEE starts killing. Yay! But when it tries to kill Val, Val manages first to make it to the Russian lander (did everyone just visit Mars in one spot, about the size of a small Midwestern town?), and reprogram it to blast off with him tied to it. I see we’ve given up completely on plausibility at this point. The filmmakers even had the Russian computer show a little digital Help Bear (get it, like a Russian bear? Oh, boy), as if to say, “Yeah, we’ve pretty much given up at this point. You may as well laugh, because there sure isn’t any suspense or drama left in this bomb.†And then the big scary bit happens, which was used in the commercial, so it’s utterly unscary, of AMEE looking upside-down at Val. Then Val blows up AMEE (yawn) then leaves, literally flipping off Mars and saying “Fuck this planet.†YEAH SHOW THAT PLANET WHAT IT MEANS TO PISS OFF EARTH, VAL! WOO! Oh brother. Oh yeah, there were Martians on Mars. Little bugs. Oh, wait, nematodes, like Sizemore says after looking at one for three seconds. Listen, they look like large insects, not fucking nematodes. A fucking tapeworm is a nematode, nematodes don’t have carapaces. Shellfish and insects do, NOT FUCKING NEMATODES. They ate all the algae. Then, they eat Sizemore, yet another character that AMEE fails to kill. But not before Sizemore utters the motherfucking dumbest line I’ve ever heard EVER in a film that tries to use science in its plot or dialogue. He rants at Val: “I’m a geneticist. All I care about is G, A, T, and P.†P!?!? He’s supposed to be listing the four nitrogenous bases of DNA: guanine, thymine, adenosine, and cytosine. G, T, A, and C. What the fuck is P? Cytosine, you fucking idiots, IT’S CYTOSINE. That other film with Ethan Hawke and his hot ass hoe wasn’t called GATTAPA, you morons. Did the filmmakers ask one of their interns to look in his Biology 100 for Film Students notes to get this tripe? Yes, I’m a fag, but I’m a fag with a goddamn Bachelor’s of Science Degree in biology with minors in psychology and chemistry, and if this isn’t the most fundamental retarded science error I’ve ever seen in a film, I don’t know what is. Anyway, Kilmer blasts off from Mars tied to the Russian lander (which I’m sure caused both professional and amateur astrophysicists to vomit in disbelief) so Moss can jump out of the spaceship tied to a line and catch him. I’m sorry, but in the near future, is space supposed to shrink to something the size of a Wal-Mart parking lot? Isn’t Mars like, big? Moss can not only position her fried-ass ship so that she’s close enough to wherever Kilmer errantly blasted off to, she’s facing the right way and can triangulate an intercept without knowing his velocity or trajectory. Uh huh. My physics professor saw this film, and he had to be carried out in a stretcher. To wind things up, we got a flashback earlier of a scene where Moss and Kilmer almost kiss. So now they can screw all the way home. It’s supposed to be a joke that Kilmer’s the “janitor†because he’s the Resource and Waste Manager or whatever. The film tries to set that up in the beginning with another unfunny jerky comment from Bratt, but by the end of the film, you've pretty much forgotten about it. However, they try to resuscitate it with Moss closing the film by voice-overing that she’s going to spend the long flight home “Getting to know the janitor.†Har dee fucking har. Since janitors and people of equivalent socioeconomic standing are the only people likely to enjoy this pus crust of a film, that’s pretty harsh. Oh well, nobody will get offended anyway, this film is too fucking dumb for anyone to find offense in it - except me. This film is fucking worthless as a thriller, worthless as a sci-fi flick, worthless as anything except it might be The Film in which Hollywood finally realizes that Val Kilmer should never have been a leading actor, since his only good role was as a character actor as Doc Holliday in Tombstone. Aw, who am I kidding? BDR |
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