Someone really screwed up.

Whoever decided it would be a good idea to play an advance screening of Mission to Mars to a raucous audience of cynical college students should be fired. That's where I first saw this movie--in an auditorium filled with snickering young men and women who had been lured by free admission to Disney's latest out-of-this-world adventure. I can't comprehend what Disney was thinking. This is a movie for Dads to take their six year old sons to, not for anyone over 16. At the screening I attended, many members of the audience left half-way through. The rest of us settled comfortably into our seats for a fun evening of heckling the tragic piece of filmmaking before us.

Mission to Mars is the story of a team of NASA astronauts sent to the red planet to investigate a mysterious storm and recover a fellow astronaut. They have a series of misadventures while orbiting the planet (sounds like Apollo 13, eh?), and they end up abandoning their ship and escaping to the planet's surface. There they discover some strange signals being emitted from a huge monolith (2001: A Space Oddysey, anyone?). They puzzle over it for a few minutes(!), but quickly unravel the code in a most contrived fashion (reminds me of the way Batman would solve the Riddler's games with unbelievable ease). So in the end, we learn all the secrets of the universe.

The main source of unintentional comedy in Mission to Mars is some of the worst dialogue since Wing Commander. We're talking more cheese than Giordano's famous stuffed pizza. Every other line of dialogue found someone in the audience giggling at the forced delivery, the fake emotion or the uncreative conversation. In my opinion, it wasn't all bad. Once I accepted that this was a cheesy movie, it was easier to ignore the dialogue and focus on the plot. Nonetheless, much of it was hard to ignore. They would build up some steam, and I would be getting into the story--only to be knocked back to reality by an unintended double entendre in the script.

All of which is even more sad when you consider the list of accomplished actors in the film: Gary Sinise, Tim Robbins, Don Cheadle, Connie Nielsen and Jerry O'Connell. You can tell that they're trying to bring some subtlety to their roles--trying to lend some real-life depth to their two-dimensional characters. But they can't. The film is too streamlined, too earnest, too Disney-fied for them to do their jobs.

There were a few good sequences in Mars. Regardless of its similarities to Apollo 13, the scene where the crew frantically tries to fix a breached hull made me tense. I actually felt worried that Gary Sinise would lose all his oxygen and die! Likewise, as they escaped the broken ship and drifted toward the looming red planet below. These scenes were standard movie thrills, but enjoyable nonetheless. However, the best scene in Mars was so out of place that it almost seemed like a mistake. The camera travels around the circular core of the space shuttle, playing with our ideas of gravity and spacial reality. Crew members pass by upside-down, climbing horizontal ladders and dropping tools sideways. Finally, the camera floats through a doorway and follows Tim Robbins and Connie Nielsen in the midst of a weightless tango. They twirl and slide elegantly in all three dimensions, free from the restrictions of an earthbound dance... Then the scene ends, and everyone starts chuckling again.

If I were a parent looking for a fun way to spend Saturday afternoon with my kids, I might take them to see Mission to Mars. It's sterile and unoffensive, with enough cool space scenes to make a future astronaut's eyes widen in excitement. These are the people Disney should me marketing the film to, not to us sarcastic twentysomethings. But hey--if you like to laugh AT your movies rather than WITH them, go for it.