Movie Review! The Last Days on Mars




The first manned mission to Mars is coming to an end after six months of exploration.  As members of the crew prepare for their rendezvous with their ride home, one member discovers fossilized evidence of bacterial life.  Not wanting to share the discovery with the rest of the crew, he fabricates an excuse to return to the site of origin and gather more evidence under the pretense of fixing a sensor.  The drilling opens up a chasm beneath him and he is lost in a cavern below the surface of the planet presumed dead.  This incident sets off a calamitous chain of events as the rest of the crew is exposed to a highly infectious bacterium which quickly turns them into killing machines.

 The basic plot of alien organisms infecting the crew in space somewhere has been done over and over in countless forms of media.  What drew me to this movie was the cast.  Liev Schreiber, Elias Koteas, Olivia Williams and Romola Garai star as the doomed crew on the planet and their performances give credence to this film.  The effects are also above board and I really found it difficult to pick apart.  Maybe that is due to my ever lasting love of all things horror and science fiction but placing that aside, this movie was worth the time to watch.

The Last Days on Mars was directed by Ruairi Robinson and adapted for the screen by Clive Dawson.  The movie was based on the short story “The Animators” by Sydney J. Bounds (written in 1975).  


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