Following the success of movies like Moon, someone thought it would be a good idea to try with a movie about a mission towards Mars. Mark Strong starts off as an astronaut that is sent there and thinks about his place in the world and talks to people on Earth. It got me excited. Yet by the end I couldn't decide if I am to feel stupid or offended.
Alarm bells started to ring in my mind almost immediately. The personality of the guy was unstable to being cowboyish. The science didn't add up. The atmospheric dye effects had no connection to space or to the story. The water got contaminated by a battery short?! The astronaut's motivation to go to Mars was specifically because he liked the feeling of dying. I mean, come on!
But even with all this aside - and I am capable to putting aside the technical aspects - the film is actually saying nothing concrete. Should we abandon going to space because it is folly or is it that the writer has so little faith in NASA that he thinks all astronauts will be allowed to be depressed artists that write their journal with pencils and feel lonely in space? Is there a point to all the inner dialogues of the guy or is he just losing his mind in this really slow movie? We don't know.
Bottom line: I liked the production values of the film and the acting, but I couldn't get my head around what the writer/director was trying to say. It's time artsy folk understand that not only engineers are a completely different type of people from them, but that writing and directing your own movie is only rarely a good idea.
