Red Planet Mars
|
List Price: Our Price: $3.11 You Save: $6.84 (69%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Category: DVD See more DVD releases |
|---|
Buy this DVD movie at online store in your country
Canada
Canada
Movie Reviews of Red Planet Mars
Movie Review: God Intervenes...
Summary: 4 Stars
A Sci-fi movie that moves you. Mankind will destroy itself, without some messages from God! Will WE LISTEN???Movie Review: Confounding -- or Dumbfounding?
Summary: 3 Stars
I don't know whether to give this one star or five.
I saw this several times, as a kid, on teevee. And it seemed in line with the normal.
Now I recognize that those who wrote it -- this was first a play!? -- had an amazing contempt for the majority. Had the view that the vast majority are really, really, really stupid, and prone to hysteria on the slightest pretext. Mars has an inexhaustable supply of energy derived from "cosmic energy"? Then all Americans who work in coal mines, and other energy-producing fields of endeavor, lose their jobs when those concerns collapse.
Mars has food that supercedes anything on earth? Then agriculture collapses.
Clearly anti-Communist propaganda, but the bad guy being a Nazi, the contradictions are bizarre. Or absurd. The best system is, of course, the capitalist US -- but that economy is wholly collapsed, without explanation, except for the implied reason of "evil".
The Soviet system also collapses, of course, and is replaced by a hyperpious Christian theocracy.
Jaw-droppingly dumb, it was obviously written by far-right lunatic fringe paranoids who were both ignorant of the US Constitution's separation of church and state, and -- apparently -- unconsciously contemptuous even of the US system of gov't, which one would think is meant to be better than both Communism and Fascism.
Recommended as an inexplicably irrational goldmine of stupefactions beyond the imaginations of the sanely thoughtful.
Or recommended for those who enjoy unintentional comedies which appear to be cheap knockoffs of Cecil B. DeMille "bible" epics.
Be certain to read all the reviews for whatever helpful takings-by-the-hand they might provide as means to get through this incomprehensibility.
Movie Review: Which star to follow?
Summary: 3 Stars
Phi in the sky.
You can take this one as a "cultural artifect" of the early red scare part of the Cold War if you want to get the best out of it. It was based on a stage play and uses a good vs evil model to show that God sending radio transmissions from Mars helps the Russian people throw off communism, restore the Orthodox Russian faith to public life and reconcile with the West.
In the meantime God's messages about Martian solutions to their food and energy needs almost destroys the Western First World economy. If you read Variety and other reviews the film was not taken seriously even when it was released. The film had the 1950s belief in the future promising to be better, but you have to watch the ending to see that.
Take Red Planet Mars as an indication of how some people thought about world problems back then: nuclear war, science out of control and the East/West conflict from a Manechean perspective. It's the sort of film that has a place in your collection for history's sake.
Movie Review: An unchanging classic
Summary: 1 Stars
I saw this film during the single week that it remained on the bill of one of the theaters in my old neighborhood, the old Victoria. It was on the bottom half of a double bill with some western or Joan Crawford tearjerker that my parents wanted to see. I was nine years old.
In my immature judgement, it seemed to me to be the most blatant piece of pietistic claptrap and balderdash I had ever seen on any screen--and that was after being exposed to the duck-and-cover extravaganzas regularly screened at Marshall School, the elementary school that sat just one block beyond the old Victoria.
It has turned up at odd hours of the night and early morning on local television stations about once a decade since that time.
I stumbled across this DVD on the shelves of a local video rental shop. I gave it a try, just to compare my current critical stance with that of my younger self. With a few more years of life experience behind me and five or more viewings scattered across half a century, I can now say that "The Red Planet Mars" is the most blatant piece of low budget, lowbrow, low aiming, pietistic claptrap and balderdash I have ever seen on any screen.
The classics remain ever true to themselves.
Movie Review: Sci-Fi or Sermon
Summary: 1 Stars
As a fan of classic and not so classic science fiction of the fifties, I wanted to like this, if only for the title alone. Spoiler alert, but all through this movie I kept expecting rationality to triumph. No such luck.
The movie trundles along well enough and might have been bearable as a typical pot-boiler but the "message" ending made me gag. As far as I'm concerned, other then the occasional casual reference, science fiction and religion don't mix.
Some might call it an interesting examination of the differences or commonality different viewpoints but any plot that explains everything away by the "god did it" answer is just a massive failure. Keep your sermons in you church, thank you.