Linbeymusol Wonderful character development!

Beystiman It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

Zandra The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

Candida It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

arthur_tafero This film was grossly disappointing. It gives a promise of science-fiction and then turns into another version of "The Next Voice You Here", a religious babel about God giving a speech on the radio to mankind. This one is pretty much the same. The religious evangelism is obnoxious to the point of nausea.What Peter Graves is doing in this film, other than collecting a paycheck is beyond me. I'm sure Fury would be spinning in that horse's grave, if the horse could see this film. I did enjoy the appearance of the actor from The Millionaire, Marvin Miller as a Russian official. Other than that, there is nothing to recommend this setup for an extremely disappointing conclusion, which I will not divulge.You are better off watching an episode of Science-Fiction Theater.

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.

Scott_Mercer This is a movie about a different planet.That planet would be the Planet Earth of 1952. The Cold War was in full swing, and paranoia was at its height. Yes, it was "The End of History" (oh, really, again?) and everything was so important, and everyone was so self-important.This pile of leavings disguised as a movie started off as a Very Serious Stage Play by A Very Serious Playwright. 60 years later, it is a joke to be laughed at and mocked. The worst of part of is not its religious orientation, its anti-communist propaganda, or its self-righteous attitude (although all those aspects of it are definitely awful). The worst part of Red Planet Mars, from the perspective of a film viewer, is its insufferable self-seriousness and pomposity. That attitude sends this disaster flinging itself into almost Plan Nine From Outer Space territory. I'm sure the screenwriter thought his use of Jesus Christ references was subtle and restrained. If he was of such an opinion, he was way off. I'll spare the reader of this review any direct dialog quotes, since none of them were as funny as anything from Plan Nine From Outer Space, just overdone and ridiculous.I'd like to also grouse about the plot point that these purported messages from Mars would destroy all industries almost immediately. Coal Miners would shut down profit making enterprises due to a few supposed technological advances that MIGHT be coming? The commodities markets would collapse due to food growing techniques on another planet that we on Earth could have no possible access to? I don't think so. As they say, follow the money. The Capitalists in charge would surely keep their businesses running until they had wrung out the last possible cent they could. And if these industries were to collapse, I wouldn't have any problems seeing coal miners forced to do something else. It's a lousy job and it destroys the environment anyway. But I'm sure this was all to play into the paranoia of the contemporary audience, and I'm sure it was effective to some members of that audience.Yes, this is a valuable piece of history as a blatantly Right Wing/Capitalist/Christian Science Fiction epic, which are admittedly rather thin on the ground. But this movie just proves why they are so few.Right Wingers are very bad at comedy, but Right Wingers also produce some really overwrought and useless Science Fiction (also see: Heinlein, Robert; Rand, Ayn; Niven, Larry). Case in point here. Science Fiction is all about progress. Conservatism is about "returning to a better time" in the past, which never really existed. Therefore, science fiction and Conservatism/Right Wingism are NOT compatible. This movie proves that.

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.