I refused to see this in the theaters. It looked bad.
I was right. Mission to Mars is a greatest hits movie. It tries to be 2001: A Space Oddesey, another great movie by Stanley Kubrick. In this movie, a group of four astronauts go to Mars in the year 2020, and three of them are killed by a computer generated image, so Tim Robbins, Lieutenant Dan, Jerry O'Connell, and Connie Nielson head to Mars to save Luke (no, that's not a Star Wars reference). On the way there, the ship gets pelted by very small rocks, ultimately destroying it. Before this movie was made, NASA figure out a pretty good way to prevent this from happening, but I guess when you're already spending billions of dollars on this kind of thing, you can skimp on safety things, right? Well, The dead ship results in the four astronauts being stuck in space, so they hitch a ride in a satellite, only Tim Robbins can't make it, and he starts drifting toward the planet. He knows he can't be saved, so he takes his helmet off, causing his head to freeze instantly. I don't know about you, but if I were in that situation, and I had to die by either flash-freezing my head (which I don't think would be that quick) or plummetting to the planet and burning up, I'd have to go with the latter. I mean, sure I'm gonna die, but that's a given. Why not live a few more minutes and have a really freaky experience too?
Anyway, the rest of the crew gets to the planet and find Luke, who tries to kill them. Now if you're marooned on an uninhabited planet for over a year, and you see another person do you kill him or beg him to get you off the planet? Okay, I can understand if he's insane, but why is everything ok after a minute of talking? It doesn't matter, I guess. So, Luke shows the rest of the crew the face on Mars, and there's this sound that it's generating, and the sound is a sort of phonic paining of human DNA.
I guess 20 years from now, everything about the human genome project is common knowledge, since they can not only identify a human DNA strand by looking at it, but they can also determine exactly what the person would look like.
So the DNA thing is sort of a password, and the face is a ship, and they get into the face, and a bad CG alien tells them how life started on earth. Evidently, the theory of evolution is a proven fact in 2020, even though it can't ever be proven.
So, Lieutenant Dan stays on board the ship, and the others leave and head home.
Yuck. Bad evil awful movie. In the future, beer comes in boxes, and car doors have noisy motors for no reason at all.