I'm gonna keep this one brief but just want to say that I find it a bit amusing and also feel a bit like the film-makers are assholes for tricking me into watching this. It is marketed and presented as if it was going to be a momentous Sci-Fi thriller but what actually happens is you get roped into watching a teenage love story drama that just happens to involve Mars.
Had Netflix featured the above poster I would have known right away that this film was just going to make me angry but instead, they show some action sequences and convince the audience that we are in for a real sci-fi adventure about the colonization of Mars. Ever since Leon or The Professional I have had a great amount of respect for Gary Oldman and I prefer that my sci-fi is rooted in something that is at least somewhat possible given current technology and that is exactly what this film looked like it would be.
Without giving away too much of the story which I really shouldn't bother trying to protect because I don't recommend that anyone watch this crap, is this: A group of racially-diverse scientists head to Mars for colonization efforts and one of them doesn't reveal that she is pregnant. She gives birth on Mars and her son ends up being the first person that has ever grown up entirely on Mars. Because of the difference in gravity between the two planets he grows up with a different anatomical makeup than every other human.
In his 15 or 16 years of growing up on Mars he is somehow able to catfish some chick in Colorado without her ever knowing that he is on Mars and he never tells her until he finally gets to come back to Earth. I don't remember why or how he was able to come back to Earth because I wasn't really paying attention anymore at that point.
What happens next is so cringe that I can't believe I made it through the entire film: The girl of course is a rebel who isn't understood in social situations and they are of course perfect for each other. The boy manages to get away from his NASA handlers who can't locate him which is absurd seeing as how they can go to Mars but at one point find themselves incapable of catching a very slow moving single-engine prop plane that of course his Earthling girlfriend knows how to fly.
In the end the film has a twist that if people had just been honest, and there is no reason why they couldn't have been, a great deal of the situations that the young loving couple find themselves in could have been completely avoided. When the big reveal happens it isn't surprising at all, it is just dumb.
Should I watch it?
Don't let that emotionally driven trailer give you the wrong impression. They do a good job with this in order to loop you into watching it but this was not the trailer I watched. The one I saw gave me the impression that they were going to focus on the trials and tribulations of attempting to colonize Mars but that actually isn't much of the story at all. This is a coming of age teenage drama with absurd scenarios that don't even make sense in a science fiction type way.
It isn't the worst film I have sat through in the past few months because there are some pretty great visuals that I am impressed they were able to pull off with their paltry $30 million budget. It bombed at the box office and was universally panned by critics. One person wrote " "notable only for some horrendously bad science and a career-low performance from Gary Oldman."
If you want to watch a sci-fi film don't let this one fool you. That is not what this is.
