Movie 666

Mars needs trees: Red Planet

Every year there are a pair of science fiction movies on the same subject heading. In the year 2000, the subject was a journey to the planet Mars. The first film, Mission to Mars, was so embarrassingly bad that it is not even worth writing about.

The second film, Red Planet, is a decent sci-fi effort with good special effects, an acceptable story, and respectable acting. Carrie-Anne Moss is notable in her performance as the commander of a mission to the red planet, and Terrance Stamp is intriguing as a philosophical scientist who (unfortunately for the film) dies too soon.

The story is well-constructed and entertaining, but troubling from a philosophical and intellectual standpoint. The premise is that a series of robotic missions have been sent to Mars to terraform the planet by planting hardy mosses and lichens that can survive the harsh conditions and produce a more oxygen-rich atmosphere. Finally, a human mission is sent to Mars to set up a permanent base. In this not-too-distant future, Earth is overpopulated, polluted, and dying. In other words, it’s the same as things now, only worse. Terraforming Mars, in the words of the Carrie-Anne Moss character, is “the last hope for the survival of humanity”.

What is fundamentally disturbing is that as the characters are pondering the significance of their mission and the nature of human beings, they never seem to consider the option of humanity taking responsibility for Earth and changing our destructive behavior. If humans cannot figure out how to live on our planet, how do we expect to engineer a new planet to live on? There is never any discussion of the fact that the basic problem facing humanity is an incompetence to deal with the fundamental problems of uncontrolled population growth and ecologically-destructive behavior.

The central issue in this film is sustainability, and yet the film completely avoids the point. Red Planet could have dealt with this issue from several different character?s perspectives, and even integrated the distasters of the Mars terraforming project to highlight humanity?s dim understanding of ecological systems. It should be plainly obvious to this group of scientists, especially the allegedly contemplative Terence Stamp character, that colonizing Mars will not solve the problems of humanity but simply multiply them.

At one point it becomes clear that the film is straying when Terrance Stamp says to Val Kilmer “I discovered that science doesn’t deal with the really interesting questions, so I turned to philosophy”. In the context of the film, the opposite is actually true. Stamp’s interest in philosophy focuses on the existence of God, rather than a philosophy of how humans can become a sustainable organism on a finite planet. And instead of using this kind of philosophy and a pure understanding of science to address these survival-or-extinction issues, humanity looks for a technological way out. If the future of the human race turns out the way it is predicted in the film, then we have no future.

- Dr. Mangrove

Related posts:

1. The Hulk Versus the Military
2. We Need a Blue Guy to Keep an Eye on the Warheads
3. No Country For Old Genres
4. Spielberg’s Lilly Pond
5. Versus (2000)

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