The Last Days on Mars
By Jeffrey Anderson,
Common Sense Media Reviewer
Common Sense Media Reviewers
Dreary space zombie sci-fi tale gets bloody and gross.
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What's the Story?
The first manned mission to Mars is nearing its end. Tempers flare and personalities clash when one of the crew members makes an important discovery: some kind of bacteria. Life on Mars. Unfortunately, his discovery, and his impetuous behavior, leads to a tragic accident: a cave-in. As his colleagues try to save him, they make a horrific realization. The bacteria turns dead bodies into raging zombies! It's up to Vincent Campbell (Liev Schreiber) to try and save as many of his crew members as he can before the zombies -- who don't need space suits to survive -- take over.
Is It Any Good?
It takes a certain kind of attitude to pull off a movie as ridiculous as this one, and director Ruairi Robinson simply doesn't have it. Rather than cheerful and energetic, he turns in a movie that's dreary and annoying. Worse, all of the big zombie attack sequences are shot with such awful, shaky hand-held camerawork that it's nearly impossible to see what's going on. In one sequence, a character hits an alarm, which -- for some reason -- makes the lights flash on and off so that not even the characters can see anything. The humans have no depth or chemistry. The central character is given one of those handy backstories that includes flashbacks to "something terrible that once happened." The others do nothing but complain and snap at one another. In other words, if the zombies won in this movie, it wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing.
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Movie Details
- In theaters: December 6, 2013
- On DVD or streaming: March 4, 2014
- Cast: Liev Schreiber, Olivia Williams, Romola Garai
- Director: Ruairi Robinson
- Studios: Magnet Releasing, Magnolia Pictures
- Genre: Science Fiction
- Topics: Monsters, Ghosts, and Vampires
- Run time: 98 minutes
- MPAA rating: R
- MPAA explanation: violence and language
- Last updated: April 4, 2023
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