Please people, no more Mars movies! I'm pleading here!!

My first clue was the banal tech-wannabe chit-chat between the characters in the opening scenes; for a movie taking place twenty years in the future, you might think conversation would be a few notches above web sites and hits, assuming the Net would even look the same. They could at least have had something three-dimensional looking instead of last-years web site.

Anyway, Mars is being terraformed with algae churning out oxygen, only oxygen levels have been droping enough to warrant an investigation. Fast forward past the usual cookbook crew (are all assistant-pilots supposed to be hot heads?), and just as we're about to get to Mars, you guessed it, there's a disaster; solar flare pulse not only wipes everything out, but leaves the ship without powere and everything electronic shorted out, though amazingly the main computer is okay. Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but shuttles NOW a days have this thing called radiation shielding because we all know there's a lot of that out in space, and this is twenty years from now. They should have been well prepared for it, not watched sparks and fires start all over the ship. Well, ship gets abandoned except by the female lead who gets to repair everything (and thus avoid the on-location trip to Jordan), and the rest of the crew goes doewn in the lander which then- you guessed it- crashes well away from their habitat sight.

If this overland survival trek sounds like that other Mars movie, wait for the rest. In what sounds like a script whose creation involved such phrases as"Let's throw one of these in", their scout-bot turns killer, the planet turns out to have it's own indiginous insect population- carnivorous of course, and the habitat is history before they get there. We get the usual last-minute excape from the only landing survivor- big surprise here, it's the Val Kilmer love interest that makes it back to his girl friend up in the main ship- and finally the movie mercifully ends with the two love-birds with six months of return trip. And I haven't even mentioned the whole premise of "Earth is dying let's get out of here instead of fixing things up".

And the best one yet, Mars has oxygen only not made by the algae. Enough to breath by, far more then could have been accounted for by the algae even were they still left. This not only brings up a puzzle for the explorers but a question of logic for the viewer; while the oxygen production from the algae had greatly dipped, if the overall Oxy levels were actually a lot higher then could be accounted for, wouldn't these increased levels have been seen instead of any reduced levels, especially since the region of high oxygen is in the same location where the algae is supposed to be? They wouldn't have had any reason to make the trip in the first place!

The Val Kilmer character had a line at the end just as he was about to leave Mars, saying "I hate this planet". Well, I can sympathize... I hate this movie about the planet.