By the time you get to that perilous Mars landing, fully one hour later, you may have lapsed into inattentiveness by the churningly obvious introductory passages. Try to hang in there. The pay-off of the landing will reward you. A first sci-fi picture by Brian De Palma, whose hits range from Carrie to Mission Impossible and who has had his share of misses along the way, Mission to Mars borrows liberally from films that preceded it. Yet those who know both their visionary and reportorial movies about man's thirst for intelligence about the universe will also see specific elements of everything from Apollo 13 to Close Encounters of the Third Kind here.
Special effects make the astronauts' arrival on Mars look spectacular.
It succeeds best in the visual arena. In its most stirring passages, the film is elegant beyond compare. You feel as though you are really looking at Mars, both from the panoramic and the intimate perspective. Robbins stars with Gary Sinise and Don Cheadle, supported by Connie Nelson and Jerry O'Connell, as a team of NASA astronauts of the year 2020. They have trained all their professional lives to travel by rocket for a close look at the second most interesting planet in our solar system.