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Rating: 3 stars

All movies seen on 08/15/2007

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Mars (2010)

Directed by Geoff Marslett

Documentary

Most recently watched by leiabox

Overview

A new space race is born between NASA and the ESA when Charlie Brownsville, Hank Morrison, and Dr. Casey Cook compete against an artificially intelligent robot to find out what’s up there on the red planet. ‘Mars’ follows these three astronauts on the first manned mission to our galactic neighbor. On the way they experience life threatening accidents, self doubts, obnoxious reporters, and the boredom of extended space travel.

Length 82 minutes

Actors

Cynthia Watros | Mark Duplass | Zoe Simpson | Liza Weil | Kinky Friedman | Paul Gordon | Geoff Marslett | James Kochalka | Nicholas Koller

Viewing History (seen 1 time)

Viewing Notes

This originally appeared as a DVD review for PopSyndicate.com.

Throw some guys in a can shoot them at the Red Planet.

NASA needs some positive spin these days because it appears they’re moving at a snail’s pace. Now companies like Scaled Composites and Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic are, at least in the eyes of the public, making low gravity jumps towards a Star Trek-like world.

Luckily for NASA they’ve had some success with Spirit and Opportunity, two rovers that made some startling discoveries on Mars and are still going two years later. Director George Butler (who looks suspiciously like my grandfather) heard that NASA had plans to launch these two robots towards the planet in hopes of discovering evidence that at one time, it could have supported life. Roving Mars documents that adventure from 2003 to 2005 as the team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Cape Canaveral builds two robots that must survive on their own and catapults them into space where they discover evidence of water beneath the harsh surface of the planet.

With its oft-spectacular CG visuals, Roving Mars is a film that was definitely best left on the IMAX screen. If you have to watch it on a regular TV, you simply must watch it on a high-definition disc format: HD or Blu-Ray. Past that, opt for component cables on a HD display. Past that, don’t even bother watching unless you’re a hardcore space nut or want to learn your kid a thing or three.

The doco only clocks in at a too-short 40 minutes, so The Mouse wisely opted to throw in two special features. The first, “Mars: Past, Present and Future,” is a making-of documentary which details the setup and filming of the documentary, as well as the efforts by NASA to interest kids in the space program. Unfortunately it reuses much of the same footage from the documentary you just watched. The second is “Mars and Beyond,” a well-preserved 60-minute 1957 Disney documentary from the classic ABC TV show Disneyland that explains the evolution of man and the future of space travel. While it’s funny and anachronistic and about half an hour too long, it’s surprising that in reality, we (the general public anyways) still don’t know much more about Mars fifty years later.

Documentaries like these, in the end, only serve to lessen my frustration with NASA only an atom’s width because it feels like we’ve made very little progress since the moon landing in the sixties. We’ve put robots on Mars; now we should be concentrating on getting man there as soon as possible. Frontiers are not blazed by examining every infinite detail and worrying to the nth degree; that’s why fictional characters like James Kirk are so much more appealing. Throw some guys in a can shoot them at the Red Planet.

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