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Last Days on Mars

Last Days on Mars (2013) Movie Poster
  •  UK / Ireland  •    •  98m  •    •  Directed by: Ruairi Robinson.  •  Starring: Liev Schreiber, Elias Koteas, Romola Garai, Olivia Williams, Johnny Harris, Goran Kostic, Tom Cullen, Yusra Warsama, Patrick Joseph Byrnes, Lewis Macleod, Emma Adrid, Paul Warren.  •  Music by: Max Richter.
        On the last day of the first manned mission to Mars, a crew member of Tantalus Base believes he has made an astounding discovery - fossilized evidence of bacterial life. Unwilling to let the relief crew claims all the glory, he disobeys orders to pack up and goes out on an unauthorized expedition to collect further samples. But a routine excavation turns to disaster when the porous ground collapses and he falls into a deep crevice and near certain death. His devastated colleagues attempt to recover his body. However, when another vanishes, they start to suspect that the life-form they have discovered is not without danger.

Trailers:

   Length:  Languages:  Subtitles:
 1:07
 2:26
 0:31
 
 
 0:16
 
 

Review:

Image from: Last Days on Mars (2013)
Image from: Last Days on Mars (2013)
Image from: Last Days on Mars (2013)
Image from: Last Days on Mars (2013)
Expecting intelligent sci-fi from a Hollywood flick? Really? Are you high on crack, or just an incurable optimist? They don't make those anymore (and rarely ever did, come to think of it). Rather than a fresh new idea, something in keeping with the best of sci-fi literature (works which Tinseltown's deranged executives persistently keep ignoring), TLDOM serves you just another zombie flick. "Zombies on Mars" might as well be the more accurate title rather than the somewhat romantic-sounding "The Last Days On Mars" which is quite misleading in a sense. "Martian Zombie Holocaust" would also apply, the sort of title we might have had in the B-movie 50s, but with excellent visuals, not to mention an incomparably higher budget.

Pity, because the dialogue is way above average for this type of movie, and the cast is very solid. These astronauts actually sound and look like astronauts, rather than like a bunch of grimacing, smart-ass, wise-cracking idiots such as the type we had the privilege of annoying us in "Event Horizon", "Prometheus", and all those other movies; you know what I mean.

Serbian viewers will be thrilled (at first) to know that a Serb man is part of this Mars mission -' and that he doesn't kill any Croats or Bosnians sneakily, nor does he plant a nuclear bomb to blow up a major American city. They will be even more thrilled to know that he is the one who discovers life on Mars. The part that might thrill Serb viewers a lot less is that he turns out to be a glory-hungry liar who endangers the whole mission. Well, "endangers" is not the right word; how about "ruins the entire mission and gets everyone killed"? Serbs; bless 'em. Hardly the innocent sheep that they self-righteously claim they are, but vilified so over-the-top by stereotype-obsessed, clueless, and biased Hollywood that you can't help but laugh sometimes.

I am not quite sure why Schreiber was so scant with his description of the situation in his message to Earth. All he said was that there was "an infection" -' except that this idiotic, limited, misleading description doesn't exactly evoke images of ravenous skull-shaped zombies feeding on warm astronaut flesh. So, yes, that was quite stupid. You'd think a more accurate -' and useful - message would have gone something like this: "Been attacked by ugly monsters who bite and turn us into homicidal lunatics, and everyone got butchered and it was a huge mess, and all my colleagues are either torn to pieces or running around aimlessly, hoping to bump into me so they can suck all of my blood out, and if you ever send anybody here again to this bloody overrated planet, make sure they are armed to the teeth like those goofy soldiers from the movie ALIENS and stuff!"

Fairly lame is also the total lack of explanation regarding the outbreak. The epidemic simply starts and kills everyone. That's all folks, that's all the information you'll get.

"The Last DAY on Mars", singular. The movie covers the events of the last 20 hours, and if my knowledge of days and hours serves me well, 20 hours is less than a day and even less than several DAYS. I am surprised that such a dumb flaw could actually make its way into a movie's title. Then again, it IS a Hollywood film about zombies, financed by dumb executives most of whom got their jobs through nepotism or for belonging to that other "proper breeding" elite group.


Review by fedor8 from the Internet Movie Database.

 

Featurettes:

   Length:  Languages:  Subtitles:
 3:19
 
 

Off-Site Reviews:

Apr 26 2014, 10:44