The Last Days on Mars

Dir: Ruairí Robinson

2013

***

Director Ruairí Robinson had impressed everyone with his sci-fi shorts so when he was given the opportunity to shoot a feature-length sci-fi horror/thriller on Mars there was much rejoicing. I like a sci-fi horror set in space, I even like the bad ones but after making some great little short films, each with particularly memorable scenes, I expected The Last Days on Mars to have a certain edge over all the others. I'm partial to a bit of nonsense now and again and if the film was renamed Zombie Astronauts From Mars and made into a comedy I would have bought front row seats but this was a serious horror/thriller made to be taken seriously. There was attempts to make the film as believable as possible but these weren't good enough in my personal opinion. The truth is Astronauts are very ordinary people, very clever, with amazing stories (I've met a couple at sci-fi conventions) but they are not buff, overtly sexy or young. I know, I know, this is a big Hollywood action film, young, buff and overtly sex people sell films but it is the clever bit I really have a problem with. In the film, our Astronauts aren't particularly bright, which they really have to be in order to get themselves into space. Zombies feed on stupid (and brains) it's true, but wouldn't it have been nice to have a clever film, whereby clever characters make rational decisions but still get eaten alive? It has everything else going for it, it's looks glorious and is beautifully shot, it would have been nice to have had some intelligence to back it up with, because that is really what everyone wants and what is missing from most films like it to be honest, I thought that Robinson might just have been the guy to deliver it. However, as critical as I've been, I still really enjoyed it. Like I've said, it looks glorious both inside the space capsules and spaceships and on the surface of mars itself. There were plenty of brilliant surprises and it wasn't as predictable as I first thought it would be. While I think many tricks were missed it wasn't just dumb fun, there are some admirable elements of intelligence about it and I was entertained throughout.