There have been many cautionary films about the human species needing to create a home elsewhere in the galaxy after ravaging Earth in one way or another. Humanity has never had the humility to heed these warnings with any agility, but at least we have the movies. Some of these films are quite good, such as Douglas Trumbull’s Silent Running (1972) and Andrew Stanton’s WALL-E (2008); others, such as Antony Hoffman’s Red Planet (2000), aren’t. Nonetheless, Hoffman’s film has gotten a shiny 4K reissue from Arrow Video, with several new supplements.
This specific subgenre of science fiction, which could be termed “manifest sci-fi” (in reference to manifest destiny), reminds us that the social contract is becoming a suicide pact as we destroy the planet and dream of others to infest and inevitably ruin, like some intergalactic parasite. Red Planet is optimistic about the future, though, harboring a kind of innocence that almost makes it charming and definitely reflective of its time.
Red Planet is set in an inexorable future in which ecological collapse on Earth has compelled humanity to seek a new home on Mars. The titular planet is in the midst of being slowly terraformed through planted algae that convert Mars’ atmosphere to something closer to Earth’s, but oxygen levels have been mysteriously depleting. The six-person crew of Mars-1 (played by Carrie-Anne Moss, Val Kilmer, Tom Sizemore, Benjamin Bratt, Simon Baker, and Terence Stamp) is sent on a mission to investigate the issue, but they encounter major problems, such that “Murphy’s Law” would’ve been a better title than the relatively bland Red Planet.
Red Planet‘s Whirlwind of Bad Luck
A solar flare triggers a catastrophic proton field problem that severely damages Mars-1 as the ship approaches its destination. For the crew to disembark and complete the mission, Commander Kate Bowman (Moss) stays behind to manually launch their landing craft and attempt to fix the ship. Murphy’s Law continues: the team crash-lands on Mars, runs out of oxygen in their spacesuits, and discovers the home base has been destroyed.
When it rains, it pours, even on Mars (proverbially, at least). The whirlwind of bad luck in Red Planet becomes exhausting and ridiculous, especially when it creates deadline after deadline in an obvious attempt to build tension. Every disaster is met with a solution, and they’re often either supremely silly or downright incomprehensible.
The film introduces more into its storyline than it can develop. It sometimes feels like three different studios were making separate movies on the same sets and with the same actors. There’s a romantic drama, an action-adventure spectacle, a sci-fi horror creature feature, and a buddy dramedy, and they rarely coalesce into one cohesive picture. Indeed, in his essay that accompanies Arrow’s release, writer, producer, and director Mark A. Altman refers to Red Planet as “Frankenstein’s monster”, haphazardly stitched together.
Some of the blame lies with the script, though interviews that supplement the new release of Red Planet make it clear that it was being rewritten each day amid the production’s chaos, which would make a better documentary than the film itself. As the special features note, Warner Bros. Pictures inflated what was originally set to be a smaller production, helmed by a director who had only made commercials and was just dipping his toes into a debut film.
With Red Planet, director Antony Hoffman was quickly pulled away from the lower-budget shallow end of the pool and was forced to cannonball in the deep. The budget eventually rose to $80 million (roughly $150 million when adjusted for today’s inflation), and multiple key crew members only joined the production midway through.
Influential production designer Owen Paterson, who was fresh off his stint with the Wachowskis making The Matrix (1999), was pushed into the shoot, and multiple artists from the special effects team of The Matrix joined him: Rob Nunn, Lynne Cartwright, Rodney Burke, Tom Davies, and Richard Alexander. Their work is consistently good for the time, specifically in subtler moments; frantic scenes of nosediving spaceships and manic robots don’t fare as well with the early CGI.
Paterson and his team’s work on the spacesuits in Red Planet is wonderfully tactile and inventive, and among the best-designed spacesuits in sci-fi cinema. The red mountains of Southern Jordan and the desolate Australian Outback make for fantastic settings, even if they created brutal conditions (especially in the claustrophobic spacesuit, which caused panic attacks for one of the actors).
The masterful cinematographer Peter Suschitzky captures and transforms these locations with the same world-building grandiosity he brought to The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), The Empire Strikes Back (1980), and Krull (1983). At the same time, he infuses the best scenes with a stillness and isolation, similar to the clinical brilliance he has brought to David Cronenberg‘s films. However, combined with the weak CGI, the action scenes feel rushed (probably because they literally were) and clumsy.
There are issues with the performances in Red Planet, as well, along with the actual actors, two of whom caused problems with the production. Val Kilmer and Tom Sizemore developed a bitter feud that turned violent, and eventually Kilmer refused to shoot any scenes with Sizemore. He’d often remain in his trailer, sometimes arriving six or seven hours after his call time, according to Owen Paterson in a new interview for the Arrow release. “Having to deal with Tom Sizemore was a handful,” said Paterson. “Having to deal with Val Kilmer was a handful times a billion.”
While notoriously difficult, Kilmer gives an oddly interesting performance as the ship’s civilian engineer and de facto lead character. He has a sweetness and enthusiasm that’s fitting for the times, though his romantic arc is almost insultingly underdeveloped. As for Sizemore, casting him as a geneticist with multiple PhDs was a terrible choice.
Red Planet utterly wastes Carrie-Anne Moss. She mainly flicks switches and talks on the radio throughout the film, while Commander Bowman is separated from the other characters. Speaking of those characters, they’re mostly indistinguishable from each other, except for Terence Stamp. The great actor appears in the film for only two real scenes, one of which is repeated as an emotional flashback just 20 minutes after it happened. It’s one of many instances that hint at the director’s amateur nature; Red Planet remains Hoffman’s one and only feature film.
Red Planet Bites the Dust
Red Planet is a curious choice of film for Arrow Video to give the deluxe reissue treatment. Perhaps the release will tap into millennial and Gen X nostalgia for the Y2K fin de siècle era of excitement, anticipation, and naïveté. It was a simpler time, at least superficially, especially for the young people of the generation. Pleasantly pre-dating the seemingly endless Donald Trump era, Red Planet was released less than one year before America found a new enemy after 9/11, and years before the true economic consequences of Clinton-era neoliberalism would rear its head.
Before that, though, the 1990s had instilled a sense of optimism, and that was reflected in science fiction. Various sci-fi films at the century’s end were comparatively looser, more hopeful, and without many or any cruel baddies, such as Roland Emmerich’s Stargate (1994), Robert Zemeckis’ Contact (1997), Barry Sonnenfeld’s Men in Black (1997), Michael Bay’s Armageddon (1998), Stephen Hopkins’ Lost in Space (1998), Dean Parisot’s Galaxy Quest (1999), and Steven Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001). This makes sense, considering that the cultural villain had changed with the fall of the Berlin Wall.
A term like “the space race” presupposes the existence of a competitor, an antagonist, and a catalyst alike, with the moon a cold and cratered finish line. The Cold War had created a fixed, comforting villain for American culture, so the dissolution of the USSR fostered feelings of not only ennui but opportunity and excitement.
This enthusiasm coincided with a different approach to space exploration. With Mars Global Surveyor, Pathfinder, and Observer successfully launched in 1996, NASA made reaching Mars seem a realistic possibility, perhaps for the first time since Americans went nuts for aliens in the ’50s. Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks (1996), Brian De Palma’s Mission to Mars (2000), John Carpenter’s Ghosts of Mars (2001), and María Lidón’s Stranded (2001) all went to the planet alongside their brother with a bloated budget, Red Planet.
Red Planet is arguably worse than all of those films, the most banal, and definitely the biggest box-office disaster. Nonetheless, Arrow’s 4K reissue really makes a case for its visuals. Outside certain moments of archaic CGI, this is an absolutely stunning 4K transfer, turning a horrible film into one that’s bad but beautiful. The textures, depth, and clarity are astounding, especially in the dusty, wide-open scenes of trekking across Mars.
The lossless DTS-HD 5.1 Master Audio is meticulously detailed but still wholly enveloping. The aforementioned special features add context and include some wonderful, jaw-dropping anecdotes, and the packaging is well designed. It’s just a shame so much work went into such a weak film, but maybe it will find a new, belated audience in these much less innocent times.