Zombies on Mars! We finally did it!
I can see the pitch meeting now: “It’ll be ‘Gravity’ meets ‘The Walking Dead’!” Alas, this thriller about a group of astronauts on an exploration mission getting picked off by a virulent bacteria fails to live up to the awesomeness of its own campy premise.
“The Last Days on Mars” is initially reminiscent of Duncan Jones’ terrific space indie “Moon,” as the crew putters around performing everyday chores and gently bickering. The old jazz song “Blue Skies Are Around the Corner” plays as Olivia Williams’ character, the hard-edged Kim, plods across the Red Planet’s surface, a silver-suited speck against a backdrop of endless crimson dust and rocks.
Everyone is getting ready to leave; the six-month assignment is almost over, and a new ship, the Aurora, is on its way with replacements. (It’s the space equivalent of the old cop-movie standard: “And I was just a week away from retirement . . .”)
Irish director Ruairi Robinson goes all out on the planetary visuals — especially a spectacular dust storm early on — but the action becomes instantly frustrating as characters mutter scientific jargon at one another so fast and low, it’s unintelligible. Marko (Goran Kostic) ill-advisedly ventures back outside to investigate a “microbial anomaly,” despite the reluctance of group leader Brunel (Elias Koteas).
Anomalies: almost never good news in the sci-fi realm.
Sure enough, Marko disappears, only to resurface as an undead, gray-faced creature who’s somehow sentient enough to be good with power tools.
Soon the crew’s whittled down to Kim, Vincent (Liev Schreiber), Lane (Romola Garai) and the cowardly Irwin (Johnny Harris), who must figure out how to fend off their infected co-workers long enough for help to arrive — or develop an antidote.
For a group of presumably highly trained scientists, they make an awful lot of rookie mistakes. “You’ll be fine,” one person is assured after getting infected, then bundled into tight quarters with the others. Riiight.
The zombie action is fairly standard — lots of panic, gore, slamming of airlock doors — but it’s never clear what the creatures want. (It does not, in any case, appear to be brains.) Robinson also edits the fight scenes so choppily that it’s often tough to tell what’s going on.
Despite all its problems, “The Last Days on Mars” serves up a deliciously shivery hypothetical: Wouldn’t we all secretly love it if the Mars rover sent back footage of a “walker” or two?