Rating: E
Dir: Ruairí Robinson
Star: Liev Schreiber, Elias Koteas, Romola Garai, Goran Kostić
The plot is based on a short story, ‘The Animators’ by Sydney J Bounds whereby an eight-person crew are in the last few hours of their six month stay at Tantalus Base, a reseach station on Mars, with inbound the spaceship Aurora complete with lander to pick them up. It seems however that one of the crew has a side-hustle in mind and heads out in one of the solar-powered rovers to recover yet more soil samples that indicate life, a sneaky find that he has decided to keep quiet about and it is whilst he is collecting this last sample that calamity befalls the ne’er-do-well, with the ground beneath his feet opening up to swallow him whole. In turn it transpires that the alien biology has unimagined properties and, with the scene set, this Martian Zombie Apocalypse may ensue.
And. It’s dreadful. Just dreadful! Save yourself any more time, note the film and avoid.
The shame of it is that Liev Schreiber (as Vincent Campbell) is likeably solid in his role, even given the bucket of cold puke that is this moronic plot and dreadful script. The others? Well they do the best they can – probably – but the problem is that they can only give you what’s in the script, and you will be too preoccupied to really notice how well they perform as you will be (well, I was) too busy screaming at the screen at the utter brainless stupid-stupidity that they (got paid to) enact. That said, a small nod must go to Romola Garai (as Rebecca Lane) for not burying her face in her hands and sobbing the entire time, whilst a couple of the other performances give the impression have been sent in over Skype whilst under heavy sedation.
Without dwelling – because I refuse to waste any time on this steaming pile of crap – the whole farce is exemplified when ‘patient zero’ arrives back at Tantalus research base on Mars, to attack a crew member who, in the kerfuffle, manages to press the panic button. This panic button switches off all the lighting, to replace it with solely red rotating flashing lights whilst helpfully also setting hooters hooting loud enough to drown out any conversation. So. In summary. The panic button both blinds and deafens the crew. Right. Yeah. Okay. And this is the level of the script and story. A drunk twelve year-old could have done better, even after eating most of the lead-based crayons.
The level of disbelief you’ll have to generate includes having to accept that the cream of the ‘definitely not NASA’ crew are all each varying degrees of completely dysfunctional asshats who will burst into a blind rage/panic/sobbing tears/sociopathic silence at the sight of a broken nail. Consider yourselves warned for far too much of this rubbish is typical ‘closed room’ trope, tediously done with no real surprises along the way.
This is easily the worst film that I’ve not switched off for a very long time. Which does beg the question: Why didn’t I switch it off? Well, I was so stunned at how incredibly poor it was that I simply couldn’t imagine that it could possibly manage to stay at such a dreadful level for the entire 1 hour and 41 minutes.
And. Well. It did! I note that IMDB give this a ‘Dark Comedy’ tag. And. Nope, it’s about as funny as a case of shingles!
Okay. Taking a breath. I have been hard on the film. The sets and various other ephemera are variously quite good. But just not the script. Avoid.