{"id":4347,"date":"2016-08-18T20:56:40","date_gmt":"2016-08-18T20:56:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/?p=4347"},"modified":"2016-08-18T20:56:40","modified_gmt":"2016-08-18T20:56:40","slug":"the-last-days-on-mars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/reviews\/the-last-days-on-mars\/","title":{"rendered":"The Last Days on Mars"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"The<\/a>
The Last Days on Mars<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Director: Ruairi Robinson
\nWriters: Sydney J. Bounds (short story), Clive Dawson (screenplay)
\nStars: Liev Schreiber, Elias Koteas, Romola Garai<\/p>\n

I really wanted to like The Last Days on Mars<\/strong>. I really tried to like it. For one thing I’m a sucker for alien type films – I can enjoy the crappiest film if it includes an isolated group of bickering characters getting progressively chomped on by an ornery monster. And it has a great cast – a perfect cast for this kind of thing – a mixture of American and English character actors, most of whom you recognise without quite remembering their names. But… I don’t know. It’s not that The Last Days on Mars<\/strong> is bad, in all honesty it’s perfectly acceptable and made with some skill. I just think I expected more of it than being a more expensive, less imaginative remake of Planet of the Vampires<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

A group of scientists are coming to the end of their term on Mars, wrapping up their work gathering samples and researching minerals. It’s a bad time, therefore, for Marko (Goran Kostic) to discover the fossilized evidence of bacterial life. While investigating further the ground collapses beneath him and he he falls into a cave, dying instantly. The bacteria, however, has some unforseen side effects: it causes anyone who suffers any kind of skin abrasion to turn into a crusty faced zombie, determined to infect anyone and everyone around them. Who will survive? And if they do, will escaping only serve to spread the infection further?<\/p>\n

Based on a short story by pulp novelist Sydney J. Bounds and adapted by Clive Dawson, this offers very little that’s new to the genre; in fact it plays very much like a science fiction version of The Bunker<\/strong>, the horror film which Dawson wrote back in 2001. In its favour, the characters are well – if briefly sketched – and the visuals are wonderful. But once the action kicks in it all becomes rather confused and strangely lacking in tension; there’s a lack of stillness acting as a contrast to the more frantic action. All of which means that it ends up being a decent it somewhat disappointing b-movie with aspirations.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A group of scientists are coming to the end of their term on Mars, wrapping up their work gathering samples and researching minerals. It’s a bad time, therefore, for Marko (Goran Kostic) to discover the fossilized evidence of bacterial life. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4349,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1214,8],"tags":[1295],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4347"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4347"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4347\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4350,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4347\/revisions\/4350"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4349"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4347"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4347"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4347"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}