Absolutely Fantastic

Clever, believable, and super fun to watch. It totally has replay value.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

I'm mystified by the glowing reviews of this movie. I can't see any redeeming qualities about it. It's both boring and nonsensical. And it's not even scary.

John Carpenters second to last theatrical film is an entertaining sci-fi remake of his early classic film "Assault of Predict 13," but is sadly nowhere as thrilling or as original as his best films. The film's story was originally going to be a third Snake Plissken film titled "Escape from Mars" with the exact same story and Plissken in the Desolation Williams role, but with the box office failure of "Escape from L.A." that plan was scrapped. Instead, this film features a terraformed Mars run by women in a matriarchal society when dangerous criminal Desolation Williams, Ice Cube, is supposed to be transported out of the mining colony by tough cop Natasha Henstridge. What goes wrong is that the ghosts of dead martians are accidentally released, who then possess the colony's miners, leading them to lay siege to the few surviving humans, which includes cops Henstridge, Jason Statham, Clea DuVall, and Pam Grier, who have put trust in master criminal Ice Cube in order to survive. In the miss column for the film, the special effects are disappointingly cheap, it's missing director Carpenter's trademark suspense and instead focuses on action, and the film in general seems to have too ambitious of a scope for it's limited budget. However, in the plus column, the film does feature a cool cast, music by Carpenter and Anthrax, and does feature Carpenter's trademark Howard Hawksian storytelling callbacks. Although this is certainly one of Carpenter's weaker films, it's still not all that bad of a film and is still entertaining.

John Carpenter has made a pretty decent living out of directing low-budget action-horror flicks in various sub-genres. A couple of his sci-fi efforts are genuinely good fun. This movie isn't one of them.Natasha Henstridge has visual appeal, but delivers her lines with all the emotion of a lump of granite. Ice Cube proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that he is no actor, despite a couple of passable earlier efforts in 'Boyz n the Hood' (1991) and 'Friday' (1995). Jason Statham's character Jericho - supposedly attractive due to his breeding prowess - couldn't get a root in a brothel.The Martians are about as scary as a good bottle of shiraz... three of which may increase your enjoyment of the movie to a tolerable level. No, make it four. Carpenter doesn't even manage a workable soundtrack... usually one of his strengths. I got really familiar with the bits that were saying: "Go to the fridge and find some munchies. Super-boring bit coming up."If you want some topnotch Carpenter sci-fi, check out cult favourite 'They Live', either of the 'Escape from...' movies, or mega-classic 'The Thing'. This one, however, deserves a swift and permanent burial.

Another nail in the coffin of John Carpenter's long-dead career, this braindead action romp is an empty offering missing all the right spots and ending up as an oh-so-predictable seen-it-all-before mess of a movie. Sure, it's pretty enough; the Martian landscapes, bathed in red, are impressively portrayed for the film's budget and the night shooting gives it an extra level of atmosphere it might otherwise have missed. Unfortunately, the visuals are all that this film offers. After some effective scene-building, it becomes yet another us vs. them gung-ho action epic with the heroes shooting hundreds of bullets and using martial arts to destroy the zombie-like bad guys. Not that I'm against action, but this is so suspenseless and uninteresting that I have no choice but to complain.Carpenter seems to think that excitement equals shooting loads of action really fast and intercut, so the action bits are over really quickly. For the best example, look at the difference between this film and his '70s classic ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13. The latter was dark, brooding, mysterious, and exciting, because Carpenter let the audience take their time to get to know the characters before bombarding them with increasingly elaborate scenes of action. The film was low budget, the action scenes limited in scope, but nonetheless it has ten times the impact of this glossy, overblown effort with not one element of suspense in it whatsoever. The only good things about the fight scenes are some groovy gore FX (including a couple of nifty decapitations by frisbee) but these are over so quickly as to be unsatisfying. The score, which sounds like a dirge all the way through, is so out of place in this film (or any), that it's astonishing for Carpenter to misjudge this key element so badly.The film's foes are quite interesting but sadly nothing is ever made of their alien personalities, they just become faceless attackers, zombie-like in the worst sense. Carpenter builds up the mystery by showing some alien artwork (metal implements arranged into bizarre hanging displays) and has an interesting, original element in the body piercing done by the aliens on their bodies, perhaps to disfigure themselves to show their hatred of the human form. But their origins and motivation are never explored. Heads on sticks are a concurrent theme but the effects here are cheap-looking and Carpenter cribs his first shock scene (the hanging bodies) from PREDATOR 2. I had to laugh at the cheap CGI aliens who appear in a flashback dream, their features masked by overlaying the image of somebody's face, wish we could have seen more of their cheesiness.Natasha Henstridge leads a cast of uninteresting two-dimensional characters through this movie. Henstridge is dreadful and upstaged by Ice Cube, himself putting in a lazy performance which is nonetheless the best in the movie. British actor Jason Stratham is wasted in the sidelines as a hard-as-nails sergeant whilst blaxploitation icon Pam Grier looks awful in a silly wig and is killed off almost straight away. Add into the brew ludicrous character names like Jericho, Desolation, and most unforgivably "Big Daddy" and you have an idea that the scriptwriters didn't give a damn. You won't either. Thumbs down to this vapid enterprise in effects and no magic.