Der lange Weg zum Mars

Please, do NOT listen to the people who gave this movie positive marks. "Horrible" doesn't do this movie justice. Bad acting, sub-par special effects and a bad script are just a few of its downfalls. And Judge R. (the reporter) gave me hives just by his irritating acting.

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.

Not only is it unrealistic, it's flat out insulting. Complete torture to watch and the ending made me want to break my TV.

Those "commercial breaks" are the dumbest movie gimmick out. I was at least hoping for some clever future ad tag lines like "the sky is no longer the limit", but no, all you get is a blank screen. What a way to bore anyone watching. Actually, I might have perfered to watch a blank screen for the entire hour and a half.

Anyone giving this movie a positive comment must have worked on it.