Red Planet (2000)

There is a dying Earth in Red Planet, and it is treated as a scheduling problem. The algae seeded across Mars has stopped producing, the oxygen is falling, and a crew is dispatched to determine why. This is the correct use of an environmental catastrophe in a studio picture of 2000: it generates urgency and then steps aside so that men and women in bulky suits can argue about fuel. The film has no sermon to deliver on the subject and no apparent interest in delivering one.

The personnel are worth a moment. Carrie-Anne Moss commands the mission, and Benjamin Bratt flies it, and neither fact is presented as a thesis. Kate Bowman is capable, she ultimately retrieves the male lead from a failing orbit, and the screenplay declines to make anything of it. She is a competent officer in a survival plot, which is a modest achievement and nothing more. The romance that closes the film is a stock beat, the diversity of the crew is ambient, and the picture contains no other social architecture to speak of. No same-sex anything. No meditation on race. No interest in bodies, minds, or the histories that might be revised.

The rest is machinery, and the machinery is agreeable. A malfunctioning military robot stalks the crew, a dead Russian probe becomes a launch vehicle, and Martian nematodes turn out to be the answer. The film solves problems in sequence and refuses to lecture us about them. It is a lean, humorless, mostly forgotten exercise in zero-sum plotting, and there are worse ways to spend ninety minutes. Even the off-screen conduct of its stars, which involved an exercise machine and a thrown weight, was at least a matter of physical logistics.