John Holden Much as I love 1940s-60s sci-fi, this is mostly painful to sit through. There's almost no plot advancement outside of talk, talk, talk. All the main points are spelled out for you. To vary it a little, people yell at each other and yell about the scienceYou'd think it was based on a play ... oh, what a surprise, it's a movie version of the play "Red Planet".The political bits ~ 1/3rd of the way in are good. Lobby groups immediately fight against the potential productivity of Martian soil, oil, ....You know how most of the movies from this period end with a warning? eg. "It's dead but the world needs to be careful with atomic power / space travel / inverse gamma de-polaritization / setting fire to monsters / cooking spicy food for aliens / premarital sex ..." This is a long warning of the above type, with breaks for talky introspection and preaching.

zetes An interesting sci-fi flick that attempts to be intellectual instead of thrilling, but in reality it's too stupid. Peter Graves stars as a scientist who contacts Mars. After a series of communications, it turns out that God Himself is from the Red Planet and is disappointed with the Earthlings and their Cold War. As silly as that sounds, I don't think that premise itself is what ruins the film. It's just that the film isn't at all interested in the implications of that revelation, but far more interested in demonizing the Soviets, who gleefully machine-gun down people gathered in prayer, and patting the Americans on the back for being so God fearing (Andrea King, who plays Graves' wife, is so obnoxiously self-righteous you just want to murder her). There's an interesting twist late in the picture, but they immediately undercut it. This is a virtual remake of a much better film from a couple of years previous, William A. Wellman's The Next Voice You Hear. That one was a far more intellectually curious story about God speaking up about the Cold War (and the following year's much more famous The Day the Earth Stood Still strikes me as a virtual remake of that film).

bkoganbing If Red Planet Mars is not at the top of the approved list of films for the 700 Club than Pat Robertson missed a bet. But ironically the film did call something quite right, the fall of the 'godless' Soviet Union.Peter Graves and Andrea King are a pair of husband and wife scientists who manufacture something called a hydrogen valve. The presence of pure hydrogen allows for ordinary radio waves to magnified to an exponential distance. So Graves decides to see if he can contact the Red Planet Mars and find out if there is any life on it once and for all.The hydrogen valve is not of his invention, the blueprint was discovered in the Nazi archives of a missing scientist played by Herbert Berghof and Graves followed his work. Berghof like all good former Nazis is hiding out in South America, in a remote place in the Andes where the famous Christ of the Andes looks down on him. By the way the real Christ of the Andes statue does not look like that at all, what the producers used was a snowbound replica of the famous Christ statue that overlooks Rio De Janeiro harbor.Berghof is in the pay of the Russians, but he's got no love for them either, he remembers both America and the Soviets joining forces to sink his beloved Fuehrer, so Berghof wants payback for both. Economic messages showing that USA technology is woefully out of date send our capitalist economy into collapse. But later messages from Mars of a religious nature send the Soviet Union into something very similar to what happened after the Berlin Wall came down. Is all this product of Berghorf's fevered brain?For that you have to watch the film which during the Cold War was the wish dream of every anti-Communist in the world. The film is part science fiction part fantasy and all Cold War propaganda. But in fact the Soviet Union did fall and the Russian Orthodox Church in this film took the political reins of the country. They didn't do it in real life, but their influence is felt and the reactionary policies they do endorse aren't any better for their own people than the sterile political system they helped overthrow.Interesting also that in 1952 there is no question that the movie would show Christianity as the one and only true religion out there. If someone were to remake that film now, a more pluralistic society would be shown to be the Utopian one.Red Planet Mars is one of the Cold War era films that is now a curiosity to be viewed and studied as a symbol of American attitudes during the Fifties.

mellies This one has its merits in building a fairly interesting sci-fi story, out of a small budget, but the cold war sub-tones are maniqueists and ultimately ridiculous, trashing what could have been a good sci-fi exercise. Americans are the "God's elected people"(sic) and soviets are the devilish atheists ones, and the RED martians are ... Christian messengers from outer space! No way, pal!Another one for the garbage truck of history... 1 out of 10