Suicide Mission

I've seen some really bad movies in my day (i.e. Anacondas, Evolution). Mission to Mars really took the brown ribbon for "Worst in Show." This flick was intended (one can only imagine) as a serious action adventure, but comes off as inadvertant comedy. It is billed as a "thrilling, EYE-POPPING science-fiction adventure." It's more likely to cause your head to explode, so get the duct tape out for this one, if you venture into Bad Acting Land. Holy c__p! that's some bad acting. Upon a basic plot line that one can respect, was weaved a tragic series of melodramatic aclimaxes that leave the victim wondering, "I think I'm supposed to be attached to these characters?" Then comes the realization, "What kind of monster am I? I don't care whether these guys live or die." The plodding plot is like so: ca. 2020 AD astronauts depart for the Red Planet to explore. The first group meets with disaster, with only one survivor. So a rescue team is in order, including a husband-wife team and the protagonist. After some difficulties and a minor inconvenience (losing the husband to incineration in the atmosphere--they tried extremely hard to make the audience mourn his loss, but I found myself saying his lines before he did, and then laughing hysterically at the predictability of the script), they land on the surface. Of course after a year or so marooned on Mars, the survivor has gone just a tad nuts, but he soon regains his wits and explains the fate of his crewmembers. They were swallowed by an intelligent vortex. He was spared to decode the acoustic riddle (it codes for a short strand of DNA barely long enough to encode a single protein, which they refer to as if it was the entire genome...it was missing a couple base pairs, and they (geniuses) figured out that the missing "chromosome" (base pairs) was the answer to the riddle) which supposedly will allow the sojourners to unlock the mystery of our planetary neighbor. So they send the little rover to find out if their "chromosome" answer will do the trick. It does, and the giant metal face that was the source of all their woes opens up. Three of the astronauts enter the face, and only two come out. The other stays inside as it becomes a spaceship and takes him away to find greener pastures. The "amazing discovery" is that Earth was populated by ancient Martian beings, creating a kum-ba-ya symbiotic unity between the earthlings and their messenger. Wow! That was exhausting! MTM is packed with cinematic badness throughout. From the fact that any action event is merely referred to (i.e. when the rescue vessel is destroyed, forcing the team to abandon ship and crash to the planet in an even more bare-bones model, the producers didn't have the wher$withal to show us the action--in lieu of that we have some clerk telling his superior on the space station of the data stream he just picked up from the computer telling of this terrible event), to the trying-too-hard-to-create-sympathetic-characters melodrama, this is a big flop of a movie. 0.75 stars!