Mars One

Dramatising the social upheaval among Brazil's poor while their country teeters on the edge of democracy, Mars One paints a fascinating portrait of a lower-middle-class black family feeling the strain of their new reality and delivers as a finely carved slice of everyday life that's further strengthened by sincere performances from the quartet that make the household.

Written & directed by Gabriel Martins, the story is character-driven and benefits a lot from the full-fledged personalities inhabiting the script, each bestowed with tangible identities which in turn also makes the audience want to invest in their journey. Through their personal struggle & desires, the film addresses various topics & themes prevalent in families living on the outskirts.

All four characters are given equal priority & sufficient screen time by the director and despite the tone being grim & heartbreaking, it still manages to find some wickedly hilarious scenes in the process. As with every family drama, it is the conflicts & relationships with each other that drives the narrative and the actors play their roles convincingly, both individually & as a family unit.

Overall, Mars One is competently crafted & patiently told but whether it's going to work for you or not depends a lot on how invested you are in their lives & problems. Otherwise, its slow pace & meandering plot can make it a chore to sit through. Not everything lands right, for the proper cohesiveness of all the subthreads isn't there but there is ample that viewers can connect with one way or another.

This movie is a clear example of how rich Brazilians that live in other countries their whole life and barely ever go to Brazil see the country they are supposedly from. This is a ridiculous bag of political propaganda from a POV that says nothing about Brazil other than how rich and favored Brazilians love to dramatize their country from afar. And how they love to talk about realities they have no idea of. This is not a movie. This is an excuse to make political propaganda against a democratic elected President. Do not waste your time watching it.

The movie tells NOTHING about the Brazilian middle class. To begin with most of Brazilian middle class was in favor of the last president. It is ridiculous how Brazil's "intellectual elite" exploit their favored position to sell a completely fake idea of what was happening in the country. Democracy was well as strong and the country was thriving.

These "directors" were just angry because most of the public money they used to travel around the world was cut. It is a sad reality when a country has its artistic class so depended and immorally linked to a political party that they are unable to create anything independent that could ever be considered real art. Sad. That is why Brazil will never have good movies other than some few accidental works that end up making sense (usually against their original intent - such as Tropa de Elite).

The Brazilian movies that become international rarely show a view of their middle class. We can almost see the middle class subdivision.

Brasil is a country with a very open mind and mentality were tabus almost don't exist. Exept when you are talking about football.

This movie is not just the power of dreams but the clash beetween diferent dreams were diferent but similar personalities interact. The past the present and the future that help to build that dreams showing how much the world changed in 3 generations.

In a overcrowed society the ammount of good people looks like a miracle.

Everything somehow fits perfectly on the narrative and in the end felt that, if this was a 5 hour movie I still want to watch a little bit more.

Brilliant.

Rotten tomato claimed this was a Sci-Fi film due to its title and very high level relationship to Mars. One character has a dream to visit Mars. However, it really is a story about struggles in life and how to find solace/happiness with what you're given. Family Members each experience struggles in their areas. We learn about how they each overcome them. Film is in Portuguese with English subtitles. Overall, I would say subtitles were pretty accurate. Music was infrequent but sufficient. Background audio/effects were used a lot to help set atmosphere. This was done very well. Overall, a good film just a bit falls short of being classified as sci-fi.

Poignant Brazilian film about the everyday struggle of a middle class black Brazilian family in Minas Gerais state. The characters are memorable, and so is the soundtrack, photography... The producer company ("Filmes de Plástico") is responsible for some of the best contemporary Brazilian coinema. Their titles usually deal in a very subdued way about the contradictions of Brazilian society - racism, poverty, homophobia -, as well as universal themes - love, family -, in a small-to-medium city landscape, such as Contagem, in Minas Gerais. This film is a far cry from the louder Brazilian films of the 80s or 90s, but not less creative for that.

Great film.