I went to see this movie with high hopes and intending to forget all the bad
reviews I'd read, primarily because I saw that the reviewers at least kindly
noted that De Palma had lavished attention on technical details and had
gotten well-known space technologists involved in the making of the movie.
Well, trying as hard as I could to reserve judgment for as long as I could, I
nevertheless was compelled to conclude early on that "Mission to Mars" was
deeply and thoroughly BAD. It STINKS. I left asking the question (as I
often do after a truly terrible movie), "How do hundreds of people spend
$100,000,000 and months and months of hard work making a movie and not notice
that the script is TERRIBLE?" In this instance, the script was terrible at
EVERY level, from the basic scenario, through the development of the plot and
characters, to the dialogue. The multitude of technical and scientific
errors liberally sprinkled throughout only served to make the question all
the more pointed.
Long ago I concluded that a decent science fiction movie only gets made about
once a decade. Would-be claimants to this honor can keep working: The slot
for this decade is still open.
Greg Burch <GBurch1@aol.com>----<gburch@lockeliddell.com>
Attorney ::: Vice President, Extropy Institute ::: Wilderness Guide
http://users.aol.com/gburch1 -or- http://members.aol.com/gburch1
ICQ # 61112550
"We never stop investigating. We are never satisfied that we know
enough to get by. Every question we answer leads on to another
question. This has become the greatest survival trick of our species."
-- Desmond Morris
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Jul 27 2000 - 14:06:21 MDT