Special Report: Journey to Mars

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.

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.

This film attempts a novel approach to a well-used theme. It is yet another mission to Mars film, but this time it is filmed as though it is live TV coverage of the final stages of the mission- with background interviews etc to fill the gaps.

Apart from the irritating manner of the on-board journalist, this film is well enough presented; it certainly deserved better publicity that it received. But the ending, whilst interesting, leaves the viewer with too many questions. In some ways it is good to leave something undecided- it leaves more for the imagination. Unfortunately it can also leave a sense of dissatisfaction, as it did for me. Still, it made for a memorable film.

Home sick...stuck in bed....on HBO...SO BAD COULDN'T turn it off. Neat little way of telling a story in the framework of a news program..but that's it. The acting is so bad it shouldn't even be called acting and the drama doesn't exsist. Any moment of tension is erased when they "break" for commericals and go to black screen for 3 seconds and go back into it. All it does is kill the flow of what little story there might have been. This isn't even worth a six pack a couple of buddies and some heckling...this thing doesn't deserve MST3K treatment...it isn't THAT good.

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.