The Last Days On Mars: I Liked It: Made me miss Val Kilmer flipping Mars off in Red Planet

The Last Days On Mars is about the last days on Mars for a team of astronauts planning on returning home. One of them makes a discovery and it becomes a race to escape the planet before the evil alien bacteria kills them all. (Yawn)

I’ll be honest, I fell asleep for a few minutes during this one.

            You can tell that this one has a budget behind it – though not much of it was spent on the dust storm at the beginning – the effects and even the acting are all pretty good throughout the movie with a few exceptions, and unfortunately the exceptions are pretty big ones.

            I’m just gonna say it: Liev Schreiber is not a good actor.

            The only time I’ve felt he was a good actor was in Phantoms, at the end, when he was an evil thing pretending to be human, or a human possessed (not sure about that movie), either way he did a bang up job in that department. Every other movie I’ve seen him in he just doesn’t seem into his work, he seems bored and talks like he’s exhausted.

            The movie has one moment of originality, I thought, when the survivors are stuck outside the NASA building on Mars and the bad guys are inside. I think had the movie stuck with this plot, the good guys trying to get inside before their time was up would have been pretty cool. It’s always the good guys just trying to keep the bad guys out until the time is up, so the reverse would have been pretty entertaining. Of course that’s not what happens.

            Also, like Contracted, the illness in this movie is wasted on something that is very popular now-a-days when they could have gone for something much more original.

The whole movie is a series of missed opportunities to be original.

            I know that I need to keep from getting my hopes up, and I do truly enjoy Netflix, but seriously, after seeing this movie I told my wife that I feel like there’s just nothing good on Netflix. Every new movie they get that is remotely popular, or of a big budget, or just looks good, turns out to be a disappointment. My wife and I spend most of our time on Netflix watching TV shows that we don’t get to watch because we don’t have cable. We were up until almost 4 just the other day finishing the most recent season of Mad Men to arrive on Netflix, and that whole season was probably better than any of the most recent movies we’ve seen. The same goes for Bates Motel, which not as good as most, is still pretty interesting and we usually end up watching a few episodes of Bates Motel instead of a whole movie.

            Like I said, we enjoy Netflix, and I wouldn’t bad mouth it because I have no intention of getting rid of it – I’m mostly harping on Hollywood, and not even Hollywood but the independent part of Hollywood.

            The independent movies seem to have lost the nerve to go original, and that’s a sad and scary thing.