Red Planet 4K 2000

It is a pity that this rather good film has not found its audience here (nor anywhere else in the world, judging by the ratings). It turned out to be out of place and out of time.

The problem is that this film is not an action movie or a thriller. Of course, viewers expecting to see entertainment like Verhoeven's classics and other blockbusters will be disappointed. There are no hobbits, no Smith agents, and no aggressive aliens in Red Planet. What we have here is an example of the godforsaken genre of classic science fiction.

I won't go on and on about what that is — those who know, know, and those who don't can understand that it's something very boring. Simply put, a group of astronauts, equipped with technology not too far ahead of today's, suffer a disaster on Mars and try to get out of it. Nothing incredible happens. The film is about how it could actually be. More precisely, it is constructed in such a way that certain moments (inevitable) go beyond modern scientific understanding.

I cannot agree with the low ratings that have been given here. Special effects? Flawless. The author of the comment probably meant Godzilla destroying skyscrapers when referring to special effects. Of course, there is none of that. But Mars is shown very realistically, there is fire in zero gravity (have you seen that?), a remarkable scene of the descent of the landing craft; the robot and bugs are also animated at the most modern level.

The acting? Well, Vysotsky probably played Hamlet more convincingly, but if you compare it, for example, with The Matrix, I didn't notice anything worse in The Red Planet.

The script and inconsistencies in it? Of course, there are some. And, of course, the script is much more meaningful than in The Matrix, and there are far fewer inconsistencies.

There are also outright mistakes (for example, the word “nematodes” refers to roundworms, and it is not very clear why they decided to call Martian beetles that). Well, volumes have been written about the mistakes in The Matrix, so anyone who is interested can find them themselves.

I don't mean to say that the film is particularly outstanding (although, in my opinion, it is above average). It's just that it's been unfairly underrated. Overall, the situation is vaguely reminiscent of a well-known joke: “I read the book Crime and Punishment... Well, it's a decent detective story, but it's kind of dull, I didn't really like it...”