Quite often, completely separate creative entities in Hollywood will suddenly decide to develop stories revolving around the same subject matter...all at the same time. In most cases the least advanced of the competing movies will wither away and die leaving the fastest film to begin shooting all alone to get a cinema release (as happened the Alexander The Great scripts a few years ago). In some cases the studios move forward with competing projects like the Robin Hood films, body-swap pictures and deep sea monster movies at the end of the 80's. In 2000, the planet Mars was all the rage and three projects raced to the screen to capture audiences imaginations, including Brian De Palma's Mission To Mars and John Carpenter's Ghost's Of Mars. In the end it was the least likely of the three, Antony Hoffman's Red Planet which arguably was the best film.
While Red Planet has the lofty framework of interplanetary colonisation, it's basically a dumbed down action film, hardly surprising when it comes from the writer of Hard Target, Barb Wire and Navy Seals. Take one Mars mission, add everything that could go wrong including solar flares, lack of oxygen, a paranoid killer, a lethal malfunctioning robot, killer alien bugs and a good ol' fashioned ticking clock and you've got the basis for bullshit in spacesuits.
The small cast (Terrance Stamp, Tom Sizemore, Carrie Anne-Moss, Benjamin Bratt) are strong, apart from Val Kilmer in the lead who's practically comatose, the photography and production design high-tech and stunning and the effects middling...which can be said of the direction too. A great looking film that's about as empty as the vacuum the red planet inhabits.
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