Rating: D
Dir: Michael Fredianelli
Star: Carlos Flores Jr., Trevor B. Nagle, Keely Dervin, Robert Paine
The IMDb lists Fredianelli as the director of fifty-seven features since the beginning of 2008: five just last year, including this one. That’s a remarkable level of production, demonstrating a work ethic that can only be admired. However, given this was his fifty-first movie, you have to wonder why it feels such a poorly conceived item. Not technically, but the plot and characters make so many missteps, they resemble a crippled camel attempting to do the tango. Oddly, it’s the second low-budget sci-fi film recently I’ve seen which has included a woeful attempt to depict NASA and its operations. At least Alien Love had the excuse of being Australian.
This one starts off on Mars, where the rover carrying out exploratory research, encounters… something, and stops transmitting. Back on Earth, NASA – or, at least, the five employees in the corner of an office that we get to see – are concerned, and an emergency manned rescue mission is prepared to investigate. Never mind that, if we could send men to Mars as easily as depicted here, we would not have needed to send a rover. Anyhow, turns out the man who programmed the rover, Jack Walker (Flores), is in prison. Naturally, NASA is immediately able to get him released, because that’s what NASA does, and sends him on the mission, literally the next day, along with the most poorly equipped group of travelling individuals since Jack and Rose tried to share a door.
It isn’t long before bickering starts, and I’m not surprised, because Jack is among the most smug, egocentric, irritating assholes I’ve seen in a movie. Five minutes in his company, and I’d take a walk outside, freezing vacuum or not. Not that the rest of the crew are much better, all acting in a way that’d get NASA taking out a restraining order, prohibiting the, from coming within a thousand feet of a spaceship [the aim seems to be going for something like the crew of Alien, but that takes place in 2122, when space travel is routine, more like merchant shipping] Then again, the physics isn’t any better, the crew miraculously having conversations with ground control conspicuously absent any delay: signals actually take at least four minutes from Earth to Mars.
Mars is reached, Jack goes wandering, finds a box constructed from parts of the rover, and brings it back on board (okay, maybe they haven’t seen Alien…). It starts infecting people, beginning with Jack, causing them to loose all filters and inhibitions. That’s okay for him, because he never had any to begin with. The rest of the crew: not so much. This substance could have taken the plot in some interesting directions, but why it requires a mission to Mars rather than, say, being invented on Earth, escapes me. Anyhow (again!), the interesting directions fail to appear, save for some domestic drama-turned-tragedy. The film simply peters out, rather than building to anything approaching a climax. Mars may need women; it certainly does not need this.