Red Planet

A Video Review of "Red Planet"

Copyright 2002 Glenn Walker

Val Kilmer as a janitor, now why does that appeal to me so much? Because of his performance in Batman Forever? Nope, contrary to what one might think, Kilmer is quite good in that piece of crap, better than his predecessor Michael Keaton, I thought. I even liked him in Thunderheart and The Doors (and I hate Oliver Stone) and even the universally panned Top Secret!. It's his decimation of "The Saint" that makes his suffering in Red Planet so pleasing to me. Don't ever ruin TV icons, dude, or I'll root against you.

Red Planet has some great cinematography, great scene fades and the red tinge to all the Mars stuff is ingenius.



Carrie Anne Moss puts in a good performance but her appearance here (and in Memento) convinces me she's really nowhere near as hot as she looks in The Matrix. The Wachowski brothers must have used one hell of an airbrush in The Matrix.

The story is astronauts crashland on Mars and play a game of survival until only Kilmer and AMEE, a robot probe gone a bit whacko, are left. Now the previews made this out to be a suspense thriller with these two playing cat and mouse but that's not the case, not until the last fifteen minutes, that is.

And while I rooted for AMEE, Kilmer is still good here and Red Planet is still worth seeing.