"I didn't come one hundred million miles to turn back at the last ten feet" -- Jim McConnell

Mission to Mars, directed by Brian de Palma from a Jim Thomas screenplay (with story credit to Lowell Cannon) is the newest sci-fi film to hit the big screen. It renews one of the most time-honored sci-fi fascinations, what really would we find on Mars. While the special effects are state of the art, some parts of the story as a whole look and feel as old as our obsession with the planet closest to us that might be able to be explored by humans.

This is de Palma's 25th feature film and the one consistent element of his movies is that there will be interesting uses of the camera. Visuals are his strength and the Martian surface and views of "space" give him plenty of opportunity to use that strength. He also had a strong cast to work with here, featuring Gary Sinise, Tim Robbins, Don Cheadle, Connie Neilsen, Jerry O'Connell and Kim Delaney.

Sinise is Jim McConnell, who was supposed to be commander of the first mission to Mars, until his wife (Kim Delaney, who we see only in recorded visuals) was found to have cancer which ultimately killed her. Now Woody Blake (Robbins) is going to be in command, although Luc Goddard (Cheadle) is leading the preliminary mission to the red planet.

Something goes horribly wrong, killing the other 3 astronauts working alongside Cheadle. As a result, the mission that Robbins was to lead is reconfigured as a rescue mission and McConnell becomes the 4th crewmember because of his vast experience.

The science in science fiction is critical to the believability of the movie. So when a movie plays hard and loose with details not involving the science, there are bound to be problems. The movie opens at a barbecue where alcohol is being served. Astronauts who were about to depart on a multi-year mission to Mars would not be imbibing at a party at home. Not a great beginning.

That Goddard's crew would go to Mars that far in advance of the Blake mission also raises questions in my mind, given the relative lengthening of any attempt to fly from Earth to Mars outside of peak windows that last for short periods of time (for those into the details of such things, this is because the orbit of Mars around the sun is so much wider than that of Earth, you must launch when Earth and Mars are at their closest points of approach to one another. Otherwise you end up having to chase Mars and having to fly inside the orbit of Earth, causing temperature problems because you get much closer to the sun than normal).

I'm deliberately not telling you about the disaster that strikes the first crew to land on Mars, nor am I going into what happens to the rescue mission on their way there. To give away these details would be to spoil the few true moments of tension in the movie.

Some of what you will see in Mission to Mars is good. There are a couple of really strong sequences. But those good moments are few and far between. In particular I found the dialogue of the characters in non-crisis moments to be so wooden that I was surprised it had made it past the editing bay.

Don't pay full price and if you saw the trailer for Mission to Mars, you've seen a lot of the good stuff already.