Brian De Palma, who made Mission
to Mars, was often in the past accused of trying the channel Alfred Hitchcock
in such films as Obsession and Dressed to Kill. In this movie, he tried to
channel Stanley Kubrick, and mores the pity.
The film begins well enough, with a rescue mission sent to Mars in order to
find out what happened to a previous expedition. The technical details, based
in part on current NASA and private sector conceptions of what a Mars
expedition would be like, were first rate. The acting by Tim Robbins, Gary
Sinese, Connie Nielson, and Jerry O’Connell as the crew of the rescue mission,
and Don Cheadle as the sole survivor of the first expedition is first rate.
The film goes off the rails after the Mars landing, with a depiction of the
Face on Mars, a supposed alien artifact that was thought to have been
photographed by the Viking Probes, but was subsequently determined to be a
trick of light and shadow. Nevertheless, the astronauts enter the face and have
an encounter with alien intelligence that is somewhat dull and unbelievable all
at once.