Delayed Reaction: Mission to Mars

What I Guessed It Was About: Take the episode of Community "Basic Rocket Science" and replace "KFC-mobile" with "Space Shuttle" and that's the movie.

How I Came Into It: Mars has been a pitfall in movies for a while now. Mission to Mars along with movies like Red Planet and John Carpentar's Ghosts of Mars started that in the modern age which left the planet fallow until more recent failures like Mars Needs Moms and the underrated John Carter reasserted that movies shouldn't go to Mars. This is not the best way to go into a movie.

Why I Saw It: (Club 50) This is a good cast and Brian De Palma is sometimes a fantastic director. There are moments, like the initial sandstorm at the beginning, that are big and intriguing in the way that make me understand why De Palma wanted to do this and why so many good actors, like Lt. Dan, Andy Dufresne, Basher, and the chubby kid from Stand By Me would want to be in it.

Why I Wish I Hadn't: I have no idea how more reviews of Interstellar didn't reference this movie. It's a similar topic, down to the cop-out ending. Granted, the ending was essentially pulled from Contact. Perhaps this is a genre of movies with nowhere to go when they reach a climax. I get the reasoning for the barbecue at the beginning (to introduce the characters), but it made me feel deprived when it skipped past launch day. I would've preferred the version of the movie that never had them on Earth and opted to start in the space station. That would've required the script to put in some effort into building the characters rather than reducing them to recycled tropes before launching them into space (not that we got to see them launch - No, I'm not letting that go). The mix of dull plotting and characters I didn't care about made this a very forgettable movie.

Verdict (?): Weakly Don't Recommend