- Joined
- Feb 17, 2023
Thanks to the YouTube channel Good Bad Flicks (subscribe, it's awesome), I just watched The Last Days on Mars (2013), a scifi thriller/horror film set on the red planet.
It's always sad to see a film that just falls short of what it was aiming for. This movie is well acted, well shot/directed, the cast is very good, and the set design and special effects are high quality. Even the dialogue is solid.
The problem is the script and perhaps the edit. Ultimately, the story is too conventional and undercooked. The actors genuinely do a great job of characterization with what they've been given, but a little more time was needed with them to get the audience to care about everyone. The horror elements are predictable and don't have much impact because 1 ) we almost know enough about the characters, 2 ) the scifi setting makes the premise feel strangely unexplained (sorry, I need at least a few lines of speculation about how or why extraterrestrial bacteria could/would reanimate a dead body), and 3 ) you've seen this all before in better stories.
"Zombies on Mars" is a fine idea, but if your film is science fiction horror (and not science fiction-flavored horror), you've got to try to explain some of it... or go in the other direction and create pure schlock. And this movie seems like a relatively hard scifi film early on (numerous scientific inaccuracies aside), but it plays out like a horror movie, so it doesn't fully work.
Compare it to something like the original Dead Space (not a movie, I know, but the premise is similar). Dead Space succeeds with science fiction-flavored horror because, as grounded as it feels, it doesn't pretend to be hard scifi. It's a scary story set in the far future, and it lets you know that from the beginning by introducing its (possibly?) supernatural elements upfront.
And about the edit perhaps being the culprit... I have no idea how much was cut from the film to get it down to around 90 minutes, but I have a feeling it would be a much stronger movie with very little added in just the right places. It's very close to a proper, solid film. So close that it bums me out.
But if you like the elements and the concept, you might get enough out of The Last Days on Mars to make it worth the short runtime. Especially if you like the cast. (Olivia Williams is always great!)
It's always sad to see a film that just falls short of what it was aiming for. This movie is well acted, well shot/directed, the cast is very good, and the set design and special effects are high quality. Even the dialogue is solid.
The problem is the script and perhaps the edit. Ultimately, the story is too conventional and undercooked. The actors genuinely do a great job of characterization with what they've been given, but a little more time was needed with them to get the audience to care about everyone. The horror elements are predictable and don't have much impact because 1 ) we almost know enough about the characters, 2 ) the scifi setting makes the premise feel strangely unexplained (sorry, I need at least a few lines of speculation about how or why extraterrestrial bacteria could/would reanimate a dead body), and 3 ) you've seen this all before in better stories.
"Zombies on Mars" is a fine idea, but if your film is science fiction horror (and not science fiction-flavored horror), you've got to try to explain some of it... or go in the other direction and create pure schlock. And this movie seems like a relatively hard scifi film early on (numerous scientific inaccuracies aside), but it plays out like a horror movie, so it doesn't fully work.
Compare it to something like the original Dead Space (not a movie, I know, but the premise is similar). Dead Space succeeds with science fiction-flavored horror because, as grounded as it feels, it doesn't pretend to be hard scifi. It's a scary story set in the far future, and it lets you know that from the beginning by introducing its (possibly?) supernatural elements upfront.
And about the edit perhaps being the culprit... I have no idea how much was cut from the film to get it down to around 90 minutes, but I have a feeling it would be a much stronger movie with very little added in just the right places. It's very close to a proper, solid film. So close that it bums me out.
But if you like the elements and the concept, you might get enough out of The Last Days on Mars to make it worth the short runtime. Especially if you like the cast. (Olivia Williams is always great!)
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