Stranded (2001)

... but I am not sure why. The first 7 minutes are a total waste of time, suffice to say a spacecraft with crew crashes on Mars.Other reviews have commented that the dialogue is more real than acted but it gave me the feeling that here is a crew that appears to have no training in basic survival and hardly trained at all to be in charge of a space craft, so I start off wondering why anyone would send this bunch of characters on a very expensive first trip to Mars. The guy left on the orbiter must have had his emotions surgically removed prior to the mission. If this crew had trained together then there would have been some bonding etc. etc. but they all behaved like they didn't really know each other. The actual story is quite good but should have been thought through a lot more. I felt so much more could have been done with this story. The interaction between the crew is strange but somehow compelling at the same time. I got the impression that there was no strict script as such and the actors were winging it.All the same this is still quite a watch-able film especially if you are mad on sci-fi.

Stranded is a not very good attempt at a serious nuts and bolts hard SF story - ie no monsters - in which the first mission to Mars goes horribly wrong. Unable to lift off again, and with limited resources to hand, the crew do the maths and realise only two of them stand a chance of surviving till any possible rescue mission could get to them. This is a standard scenario from a thousand magazine short stories over the years. A scenario pits human vulnerability and ingenuity against the cold impassivity of the laws of physics. I have never come across this story played out so flatly and dully as here.After the opening sequence, when the ship crashes in a series of tiny scenes and brief single shots interspersed with great slugs of black - a editing technique that was supposed to induce tension and confusion but just made me wonder if my DVD payer was having trouble playing the disc - we are introduced to the members of the crew coming to terms with the reality of their new situation. After a few laughable bad attempts at working out how to survive - the most logical and sensible thing they do is dismantle the acceleration couches and take them outside because they won't need them any more - three of them decide to walk to their deaths (taking as much oxygen as they can with them!?) and leave the doctor and the engineer to wait for rescue.After an eternity of watching three people walking around in space suits with an orange filter on the camera - on Mars everything is red - the survivors find the remnants of an ancient civilisation, a mysterious ancient oasis of air, water and lichen, "from which we will be able to extract protein". The end.As stories go it's not the worst I've ever seen; it successfully avoids falling into any number of low budget SF traps and the hardware looks good but, dear god, the script is awful! At no point in this film did any of the characters look or sound like the top-notch technician scientists they were supposed to be. The first people to set foot on Mars? These people would have been the elite, the best and most capable astronauts the world have ever seen. What arrives on screen are barely sketched-in outlines of characters with no depth or consistency. Just to give one example: the doctor is supposed to be a Christian. She tells us that it is against her religion to commit suicide, she insists, against opposition from her fellow crew-members that the dead captain is buried in the "Christian manner" yet, when she gets her way and the poor stiff is dragged outside for the funeral, she doesn't say anything religious at his graveside at all, preferring instead to recite (from memory!) a long extract from Robert Falcon Scott's diary (written shortly before his death during his ill-fated expedition to Antarctica). This clumsily sets up the "'Tis a far far better thing," type noble sacrifice that is to follow but does little to create a believable character.There are token nods towards making some hard science - during an angry exchange one character suggests they make power by building a windmill, the engineer says the wind is too thin - end of discussion. Where's the detail? I'm not saying they should have stopped the movie and had a lecture about the relative densities of the atmospheres of Earth and Mars but SF movie audiences are well used to sitting through screeds of nonsensical Techno-babble - 'Captain, if we bypass the tachyon emissions through the warp core shielding this may have the effect of reversing the cloaking device's polarity!' - why not have some real science for a change? Bad script. And some really odd direction too.Better than Aurora: (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0128059) but makes Mission to Mars (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0183523/) look like a towering work of genius.

This might sound far-fetched, but this movie in its naturalistic dialogs and desperate setting is one of the best renditions in space of the crazy but humanistic spirit of nineteenth century explorers.The drive to push human boundaries step by step has seldom been captured in such a pure form in cinema. In some ways it reminds me of Tarkovsky's Stalker. The landscape are the gorgeous and alien-like scenes in Lanzarote. The actors are fantastic (even the dubbing problems due to the different nationalities add an extra layer of resemblance to a joint international mission)

I originally rented this movie as something to watch while my mom and sister watched "Must Love Dogs" in the other room. Within ten minutes I found myself preferring the chick flick. The opening scene of the movie was all I needed to realize I had just wasted five and a half bucks. The film begins with a newscast in which a reporter sets the scene for the rest of the film. A good idea, right? Except that the reporter delivers in a deadpan. He says, "This is a historic moment" in a voice you'd probably expect to hear in a lecture on earwax. The rest of the movie follows this pattern to the point where I wanted to throttle the lead actress while screaming, "Have you even READ the script?" In short, I've seen beer commercials with better acting, better writing, better special effects, and better story lines.