In short: Mars (1997)

In the near future of Elon Musk’s wet dreams, Mars has been colonized and is controlled by a single Company whose miners are tasked with acquiring a new, totally, completely, nay, absolutely healthy fossil fuel for Earth.

When a member of the Company’s private police force is killed under dubious circumstances, the delightfully named Caution Templer (Olivier Gruner), also one of the Company’s so-called “Keepers”, as well as brother of the victim arrives to kick some heads in.

Because there’s no subtlety on Mars, the bad guys responsible for the death of Caution’s brother try to kill our protagonist as soon as he arrives on the planet, making it pretty easy even for him to stumble upon the conspiracy in which the Company is of course and obviously involved. On the way, Caution acquires the help of local grumpy physician Doc Halliday (Shari Belafonte) and a local street rat named, adorably, Buckskin Greenberg (Gabriel Dell Jr.).

As you can see, character names in Jon Hess’s science fiction action piece Mars are a pretty painful affair, unless one is a big fan of awkward attempts at “subtly” hinting at the Western genre, as I am, as it turns out. Its very own special naming conventions are pretty much Mars’s only independent ideas, for otherwise, this is a cheap knock-off of Peter Hyams’s Outland, without the brains, the quiet cleverness of the writing, the Connery, or Hyams’s brilliant direction, mixed with just as badly copied bits of Total Recall. Turns out you can’t really make Outland on a DTV budget, or at least, Hess can’t.

So expect a Mars colony that looks suspiciously as if it were build from bits and pieces of the usual warehouses and industrial buildings where all action movies of this type are shot, some choice bad CGI, the usual nightclubs that look nothing like nightclubs apart from the naked women with awkward boob jobs, and a script that just screams for some proper scenery chewing none of the villain actors is really bothered to provide, even though the writing does offer them the opportunity.

All of this, apart from the lame villains, is to be expected. Why the film doesn’t seem to be able to stage a proper fight, despite having a perfectly competent screen fighter as its load, and does the kind of choppy editing nonsense you typically encounter whenever nobody in front of the camera can be trusted to execute any fighting move properly, is anybody’s guess however. It’s not as if you’d hire Gruner for his acting chops, so why not make use of the skills the guy – within limits – can actually offer?