Mars (2010)

A waste of 90 minutes of my life

In truth, any opportunity to see the film on the big screen is welcome.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

A clunky actioner with a handful of cool moments.

I am no stranger to the depths of bad cinema, being a huge fan of movies like Birdemic, Troll 2, Ben & Arthur, The Room etc. but this one really takes the cake. The difference between this and those though? It doesn't have the decency to be entertainingly bad.The movie is about a small team of astronauts being sent by NASA in 2015 to investigate if there exists life on Mars, the majority of the film being about their journey and supposedly about the romance between two of the astronauts: Charlie Brownsville, the man with the worst name of all time, and Casey Cook, the only major female character of the film with the most questionable name.All of this is brought to life with production values that is borderline Birdemic-ian: Everything is recorded on a really bad green screen, adding in CGI backdrops that make the Eiffel 65 music videos from the 90's look like a PS4 game in comparison and then lazily slapping a Photoshop filter over everything to give the impression of this being animated actors, despite obviously not being so.Mix this with acting that is beyond abysmal, a script that thinks quirkiness is more important than plot or meaning, incredibly stupid ideas such as putting a swimming pool in a space ship, and a absolutely disgusting plot twist that could be pulled right out of Foodfight and you would think this would at least be a memorable spectacle if not exactly quality film making. So why isn't this ending up as brilliant moon cheese?Well, it's... just boring for the most part.After the intro sequence setting up the universe and characters (and foreshadowing the plot twist), very little happens on their journey. Most of the time is spent relaxing, chit chattering, sometimes video-calling NASA or the president or the media, but there is no substance to it. No memorable lines or jokes, no character quirks beyond "we are quirky", not even any real character building showing Charlie and Casey growing closer to each other in any substantial emotional way, and in the end it all comes off as very dull, and it just feels like padding to turn a short film into a feature length one. There is a few times something silly happens, as mentioned they go swimming in a freaking pool in space which is ridiculous, but those moments are so few and far between they don't save it and it all becomes a blur of vague memoriesThat is, until the plot twist happens, and oooooooooh boy did that turn this from "incredibly forgettable" into the absolute worst thing ever. !ENDING DETAILS SPOILERS FROM HERE ON OUT!So in the intro to the movie, we see a few years before the NASA space travel starts, the Russian space program is sending up a satellite to scan Mars for life themselves. One of the workers loading it into the space shuttle is sick and sneezes on the satellite. It then turns out that his snot got mixed with the natural bacteria of the red planet and thus created life.Yes, that actually happens.To make matters even worse, once Charlie and Casey inevitably falls in love at the end, despite showing no signs of actual chemistry between each other, they decide to spell out their love together. In writing on Mars. Via urine. And wouldn't you know it, their urine actually creates intelligent life on Mars!All I can say is, this is near unwatchable. If you want a hipster-y indie comedy you can do better, if you want a animated sci-fi adventure you can do better, if you want romance you can do much much better, and even if all you want is stupid and corny so bad it's good trash the long wait of absolutely nothing happening kills the joy of that too. All in all a very pretentious and unnecessary movie that is too normal yet simultaneously too weird for it's own good, and ends up as barely a movie at all.

Holy wow, guys, this is one interesting and entertaining movie. A trio of astronauts is sent by NASA to the Red Planet in hopes of finding sentient life. Or life of any kind. To paraphrase the noted mathematician Ian Malcolm, although the planet appears to be barren, life finds a way. Meanwhile, the European Space Agency has sent up an artificially intelligent robot in an effort to beat the Americans.This is a stunning animated opus - yes, I said animated - that uses a technique similar to rotoscoping; director Geoff Marslett developed the technique specifically for this film, and it makes the movie look much more like an actual graphic novel. The technique is a real treat. Much like rotoscoping, for this technique scenes are shot as live action and then converted to animation, lending a realistic, colorful look and feel.The crew is composed of Hank Morrison (Paul Gordon), the captain and pilot; Dr. Casey Cook (Zoe Dean), the scientist; and Charlie Brownsville (Mark Duplass), who's, well, the backup. The redundancy may not fly in real life (no pun intended), but here we can suspend our disbelief. After all, this is science fiction, with a comic bent.The astronauts deal with the boredom of space travel, and in particular the well-named Charlie bemoans the fact that he's much more expendable than his crewmates. In fact, when the trio does arrive at Mars, Morrison and Cook are to head down to the planet in a shuttle while Charlie figuratively keeps the motor running. Morrison is the brooding type, harboring a secret; Cook is the imaginative, energetic type, quickly drawn to the everyman Charlie. And if hanging around doing nothing while the so-called real astronauts do their astronaut thing, Charlie has been directed by NASA to give live interviews to an Entertainment Tonight-like duo (Liza Weil and James Kochalka) that are designed to promote the expensive trip.Now, although Charlie has been deemed redundant (by the NASA chief Shep, played by Howe Gelb), he's actually a former hero. Did space walks and such, and was really good at them. So maybe he's not completely useless, and we can forgive NASA for tossing him in the ship. And what a ship! Although there's just the standard astronaut meals and accommodations, there's also a huge (!) garden for seeding Mars. This garden contains a pool, presumably to keep the flora watered, but a pool nonetheless. Pretty darn awesome spaceship, if you ask me. It might be worth noting that the movie, released in 2010, is set in the future - 2015. Okay, maybe the film makers missed this prediction.But this isn't a typical sci-fi film - there's philosophy afoot! Why do we want to discover? How do we react to what's out there? What is the worth of knowledge of the stars? All good questions, and thankfully the movie doesn't sit us down and lecture to us on each subject. In fact, the movie's pretty low key, with only a few action sequences - one of which does indeed involve a space walk. And the point of view we get to see isn't just that of the astronauts, because a probe sent by the ESA five years prior is, long thought to be lost, is somehow still active, taking pictures and recording video - just not transmitting. It, too, holds some interesting secrets.To some, Mars the movie may seem like just an experiment, something a film-school grad student knocked out for the fun of it. I would disagree. The movie both looks good and sounds good. The plot, although secondary to the characters and the visuals, is strong and open ended. Unlike most sci-fi stories told by Hollywood, this one offers no neat-and-tidy answers to the problems it brings up. And in this case, the ambiguity meshes very nicely with the conflicting emotions of the humans in the movie. Besides, any movie with Kinky Friedman as the president of the United States can't be all bad.

This is beyond rotoscoping. The animation is more on the live picture side than on the animated. If you saw WAKING LIFE, then you might be familiar with this style. Thick outlined drawings (or computer enhanced live action pictures) and intense colors. I love animation and when I saw Waking Life I didn't enjoyed it because of the variety of animation styles. At least this time, the whole movie follows the same style. The story is unusual and captivating. You won't be disappointed if you like original plots and original animation. Check out the little details too, they're plenty (eyes in the dark, cigar, hair, clothing items) and the outtakes during the credits. Also, check my 4000+ reviews here: www.cinematerapia.blogspot.com Thanks!

Enjoy this sci-fi valentine. Netflix recommended this hybrid animation, so I was game. At first, I was put off by the whole thing, being more of a hard sci-fi fan. But I am also into theater and storytelling, and in that sphere, I ended up really enjoying this piece of art. It has heart and it is earnest and quirky. Once you buy into the style of acting and storytelling (but I suspect many cannot) you will be rewarded with a pleasant and unique sci-fi movie. As another review had noted, the live animation is not as smooth as Linklater's efforts, but it has its own charm. Watch the credits. Very enjoyable. Seriously though, why so much hair gel?