MY CALL: Good enough, entertaining enough, but nothing great. However, truth be told, there are much better Sci-Horror space and Mars exploration movies. MORE MOVIES LIKE The Last Days on Mars: Red Planet (2000), Mission to Mars (2000), Apollo 18 (2011), Europa Report (2013) and Moonfall (2022) tell similar cautionary tales of space exploration.
As it turns out, another MFF’er (does that sound derogatory?) reviewed this film when it was released. See Mark’s review by CLICKING HERE.
Director Ruairi Robinson’s only feature film opens splendidly with gorgeous cinematography of arid Martian landscapes, happy go lucky 50s music, and routine space chores undertaken at the start of a massive dust storm on the very last day of their six-month mission.
The cast includes Liev Schreiber (The Omen, Sphere, Phantoms, Scream 2-3), Elias Koteas (Fallen, Let Me In, Dream House, The Prophecy, The Fourth Kind, Skinwalkers), Olivia Williams (The Sixth Sense, Below), Romola Garai, Johnny Harris (Monsters: Dark Continent, Black Death, The Cottage), Goran Kostic (Children of Men), Tom Cullen (Invasion, Black Mirror) and Yusra Warsama (Castle Rock) among others.
The team has not been as productive as they’d hoped, producing no useful samples to bring home. But on the last day, a member of the crew comes across evidence of bacterial life… on Mars! This discovery comes paired with tragedy as a crewman is lost, falling down a seismic fissure while collecting his final sample. Remember what happened when they found extraterrestrial bacteria in Species (1995)? Or the virus or whatever it was in The Thing (1982)? Or the first sign of Life (2017) on Mars? Yeah, these things never turn out well.
Suffice to say, a crewmember wanders back to base camp after being infected with something and becoming, for lack of a better word, a murderous bacterial zombie (not unlike the geologist in Prometheus). The infected hiss and growl like 28 Days Later (2002) rage zombies, and use tools and weapons to murderous ends just as readily… and they even solve complex problems. So, highly intelligent rage zombies despite having no pulse and, thus, evident brain death. The closest comparison might actually be the fungal zombies from The Last of Us (2023-ongoing). The uninfected crew fend off the infected as we circle towards a rather familiar ending scene in these infection-based thrillers.
We don’t wander anywhere near the Sci-Horror-ness of Life (2017), Event Horizon (1997), Prometheus (2012), Virus (1999) or Moontrap (1989). In that sense, this movie is more Sci-Horror-LITE. But it is still violent Sci-Horror, for sure.
This is all stuff we’ve seen before. But it’s very executed well. Is this to be some highly recommended Sci-Horror? Not really. Red Planet (2000) and Mission to Mars (2000) are both more entertaining, present more engaging problems, and the losses hit you with emotional gravity. But I definitely wouldn’t be steering anyone away from this either. Solid cast, nice shots, decent effects… this was a perfectly enjoyable, even if not so exciting, one-time watch.
