First, the short recommendation: Mission to Mars has great cinematography and a good story, if it were a book. Unfortunately, it is a movie, and one that doesn't quite deliver a satisfying experience. It's not a disaster movie, it's not a mystery/exploration movie, it's not an alien movie but it goes through all those phases, covering none of them all that well. Although this is a rather harsh judgment on my part, I still enjoyed the movie. I just thought it could have been more.

Mission to Mars is really about the rescue mission that is sent to Mars after the 1st Mars Mission encounters a catastrophic event. Tim Robbins is the rescue mission commander, Woody Blake. Connie Nielsen is Woody's wife, Terri Fisher. Gary Sinise is the troubled pilot, Jim McConnell. Jerry O'Connell is the young navigator/tech guy, Phil Ohlmyer. Don Cheadle plays Luke Graham, commander of MM1 and the sole survivor. Kim Delaney is McConnell's dead wife, Maggie, who only appears in a home movie and a recollection by McConnell.

The movie starts out in 2020. It's the last night before Mars Mission 1 is due for blastoff. Luke and Woody (alternate commander of MM1) try to console Jim, who was number 1 until his wife took ill and passed away. Jim looks forlornly at the stars. Thirteen months later, MM1 has a nice base camp set up. A remote robot finds what looks to be an icy dome, possible proof of underground water. The whole team goes to explore it, and while there is a disaster, one of the byproducts being a big EMP burst which destroys any electronics at the base camp and rendering the Emergency Escape Vehicle inoperative.

With only a garbled transmission from Graham to go on, Blake and McConnell convince the powers that be to let them mount a rescue mission. With spare parts and boundless enthusiasm, the rescue team is approaching Mars six months later. A micrometeorite shower hits the ship, and the crew hastens to fix the holes and the computer. But they don't fix all the damage, and when trying to establish a Mars orbit, a huge explosion destroys the main engine. They're able to abandon ship, get to the orbiting Remote Monitoring satellite and use it to reach Mars (mostly) safely.

Once there they find Graham, rather addled but he quickly returns to normal. After that the mystery portion of the movie starts as they try to find out what really happened six months ago. I'll stop now as I don't want to spoil the ending.

This is an all US endeavor. NASA is in control, all the astronauts are US and the US flag is on all the ships and spacesuits. Kind of nice, in my mind. Very patriotic, although it won't go as well in the foreign markets. There is also a lot of product placement, even with product logos on the Mars rover. That's one way for NASA to get funding.

As I wrote, the cinematography is quite good. Everything is crystal clear, lots of detail on the tech and Mars. Mars is really not a very dirty or grimy planet. The weightless scenes don't seem quite right. But other than that it's a very visual movie.

What I didn't like as much is that the movie seems to lack focus. There's a disaster at the beginning which works ok. The mystery part though is too easy. They solve one problem and then the rest of the movie just goes from there with practically no challenges in the last twenty minutes. After the movie I thought back and it just didn't seem like they were in a lot of danger. Normally that would indicate a drama, but there isn't all that much drama. The end of the movie just seems to be the astronauts sitting back and doing nothing as events move out of their control, and that's the biggest failing of the movie.

My final recommendation: if you want to see a science fiction movie, Pitch Black executes it's story better. Mission to Mars looks great and has a good story, but in the end doesn't execute the story as well, and I think it would have been done more justice in a book.