Red Planet Mars

April 26, 2005

Interesting but uneven. With the possible exception of "The 27th Day," no other SF film so embodied the spirit of suspicion that characterized the Cold War era than this one. The premise -- a married pair of American scientists (of unsurpassed prettiness) build equipment that starts picking up strange signals, apparently from Mars. Their precocious and marvelous son suggests a way to establish a basis for exchanging meaningful messages (mathematics -- who would have thought it?), and soon Earth is learning about the scientific wonders that the Martians have brought forth. Or maybe it is all a hoax perpetrated by a bitter German scientist who devised the basic mechanism of the devise used by the American scientists and who is now, for reasons that escape me, working for the Russians and manufacturing the messages and faking their origin from Mars. Or maybe it is real after all, as a very biblical final message starts coming in, and it cannot possibly be from the German...Well, it's not silly or trite. It's just not very clear what it's all about.