Special Report: Journey to Mars

I found the movie quite interesting. It is done as a "live" tv news broadcast as they are about to be landed on Mars. Of course things go wrong and the story is about them solving the problems and landing on Mars. I quite liked the ending, but won't explain what it is.

plot: space mission gone awry. Many better ones out there. Small twist at the end doesn't make up for the time spent getting there.

vehicle: movie interspersed with "live" newscasts. Done much more believably elsewhere (in many nuke-attack TV specials, for example).

acting: none to speak of. A few decent character actors in this movie, all playing wooden characters.

special effects: think Atari 2600 and shadow puppets.

The year is 2005. After months in interplanetary flight, the manned spacecraft Destiny prepares for the final two hours before separation of the landing module, and its flight to the surface of the Red Planet. The news agency GNN (Global News Network) covers these last two hours before the historic touchdown, using state-of-the-art technology, and even a correspondent aboard Destiny itself. However, powers are at work that aims at stopping the historic landing, and bring utter chaos back home. All we can do, is watch the show...

Journey to Mars is a great TV-movie, even though it has quite a few scientific errors (as how they conquered the speed of light - which is necessary to send instant transmition from Earth to Mars - which takes 4 hours each way with today's radio-technology - maybe they use some kind of Tachyon-beams?), but if you are willing to forgive these errors, you may find this quite a good movie - certainly something out of the ordinary.

The film is made as GNN's live coverage of the historic landing, and like the hit-series "24", events occur in real-time. They succeeded admirably in making it look like we really were watching a special, braking-news report of CNN (or in the case of the movie, GNN), and the atmosphere really feels as such, which makes the movie even more interesting.

The plot evolves a lot over the course of the movie, and takes quite some unexpected turns, in the end you'll be sitting glued to the screen as Destiny zooms over the Martian surface - it really feels as if it's actually happening for real!

The acting is generally quite good, near perfect at times, but the atmosphere is what really makes this film something really special, as it builds up over time.

The last few minutes are arguably the best and most atmospheric moments you'll ever experience in a TV movie like this, so I wont ruin them for you, but just suffice to say they are well above excellent.

The special effects really aren't so important in this kind of movie, but they are still quite well done. Although you may loose hope after seeing the opening zoom-over of the Martian surface (which is taken from a NASA animation by the looks of it), the effects gets a whole LOT better over time.

So, as I overall liked this movie because of good plot and atmosphere, and also because of mostly good acting, I give it a final score of 8/10.

Home sick...stuck in bed....on HBO...SO BAD COULDN'T turn it off. Neat little way of telling a story in the framework of a news program..but that's it. The acting is so bad it shouldn't even be called acting and the drama doesn't exsist. Any moment of tension is erased when they "break" for commericals and go to black screen for 3 seconds and go back into it. All it does is kill the flow of what little story there might have been. This isn't even worth a six pack a couple of buddies and some heckling...this thing doesn't deserve MST3K treatment...it isn't THAT good.

I'll not add to the bad comments about this movie, the movie speaks badly for itself quite enough. But, I was surprised to see some people comment on how realistic the newscast was. I think they should switch back and forth between this movie and CNN. The difference is astounding. Even the stupid commercial break gimmick is wrong; how many commercials did we see on the first day of the Iraq war? All of the news people look and sound like bad actors, not journalists.