Last Days on Mars

At this point, it’s looking like it would be easier to actually put a man on Mars than to make a successful movie set there. The red planet has a seriously poor track record when it comes to appearing on film. John Carter was the most recent bust. But a pair of competing millennial projects (Mission to Mars and Red Planet) didn’t fare much better…and don’t even get me started on the John Carpenter-directed catastrophe Ghosts of Mars with a cast of rock ‘n roll zombies emerging from the dust bust a cap in Ice Cube’s ass!

So by comparison, The Last Days on Mars (2013) can’t help but look good. It takes the hard science angle that actually worked well for Red Planet and combines it with the ubiquitous undead approach that, well, really doesn’t. The fact that the film winds up becoming simply “Zombies on Mars” is somewhat forgivable when you have a movie that tries so hard to be something more.

Vincent (Liev Schreiber) is part of a Mars mission due to return home in exactly 19 hours after a 3-month tour searching for signs of life. Wouldn’t you know it, on the last day a tech comes across a bacterium that will make everyone’s career. But a series of unfortunate events winds up infecting members of the crew who fly into an uncontrollable rage; despite the fact that all their vitals say they’re already dead.

There’s nothing in that synopsis that a SyFy Movie of the Week couldn’t pull-off. But director Ruairi Robinson gives the entire production a glossy and convincing hi-tech façade, shooting the action (and the menacing build-up to the action) with a the sort of controlled confidence you wouldn’t expect from a guy with only four previous short films to his credit. The Last Days on Mars looks every bit as good as Ridley Scott’s Prometheus…but unfortunately it shares many of the same story problems.

Besides the fact that viral outbreaks are pretty much passé, the film does such an excellent job of making the audience believe it’s set on Mars, expectations immediately rise after the first 20 minutes. Much of that is due to the excellent acting across the board. Schreiber, Elias Koteas and especially Olivia Williams elevate the material to major motion picture status. And even though Robinson does his best to make the monster stuff equally realistic, the cheap scares cheapen what had all the making of a first-class thriller.

The Last Days on Mars has been available via on-demand services for some time now but makes its home video premiere March 4th concurrently with Netflix Streaming. The DVD gives you a few special features including your standard “Making Of” plus featurettes on the visual effects.