The year 2078. Life on Mars has become a reality. Remmy was born on this planet and has never been to Earth. Her family lives in an isolated colony bounded by an oxygen dome. But when their home is attacked by armed invaders, Remmy is forced to face what her parents kept her from, and learn what Mars really hides.

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Wyatt Rockefeller’s film seems to have been made for one purpose: to show that even on Mars there can be great problems in society. A very limited society.

A family of three – dad Reza (Johnny Lee Miller), mom Ilsa (Sofia Boutella) and their daughter Remy (Brooklyn Prince) live in an isolated colony on the Red Planet. It’s isolated by a special dome that allows the family to walk around outside without any spacesuits and, attention (!!!) even raise pigs in the backyard! But one day the bad guys come onto their property and the quiet life comes to an end. A shooting, a couple or three dead bodies, and now Remy has to become an adult very early on…

So there you have it, the problems in society on Mars. This film, or rather its script, seems to have set itself the primary goal: to make life for Remy not to seem like honey. Not only was the girl born on Mars in a run-down colony, where the only entertainment is piglets (well, you can harness them and ride the red rocks!), but she was forced to grow up with her parents without the ability to communicate with her peers. And then there are the uninvited guests who hurt her parents. She is left alone with her thoughts and she is left alone with an unintelligible man who expresses himself with spatial phrases like ‘This is the way it should be’ or ‘You don’t understand’. But at the same time he is afraid to say his thought directly, he suggests flirting with the young person, hinting that He and She is the only hope for mankind on Mars and that the continuation of the species depends on their coitus. Rather than becoming a ‘Mars hostage’, Remy becomes a hostage of the screenwriters, who wanted to make sure that the heroine had no alternative at all.

Another problem with the script (and thus with the story) is that the film alludes to certain attitudes that are not supported by anything. The film raises too many general questions about the situation on Mars in general, but operates only on private things-in this case revolving around Remy’s family.

What’s going on on Earth, how big is the dome sheltering the colony, how far you can get to feel comfortable on the planet, how did the invaders with weapons get under the dome or did they exist under the dome (but then the dome is very big, since it took people with weapons so long to stumble onto the colony), how come there’s so much water under the dome (to fill a whole pool with it), how come the piglets multiplied at the end of the movie if we only saw one piglet throughout the whole movie, what kind of a dome that not only creates the right atmosphere but also allows the temperature underneath not to drop enough to sleep on the rocks at night. .. After all, what mission did Reza and Ilsa have in the colony (judging from the movie they just lived there and raised pigs), are there any similar colonies anywhere else?

Because of all the questions that arise when watching it, ‘Hostages of Mars’ turns out to be too superficial a film in which the creators are given a certain set-up, but without too much detail. Neither the screenwriter nor the director go into the nuances, suggesting to follow the chosen path and if a question suddenly arises, there will always be a ready answer – ‘because’.

And this is where we can return to the question of the film being driven into a strict framework and not giving either Remy or her mother a chance and there is a right to choose.

If we consider ‘Hostages of Mars’ in the context of other films about colonized planets, this movie is of course significantly inferior in all respects. The same ‘Screamers’ from 1995 looks an order of magnitude cooler and more elaborate than ‘Hostages’, offering an actually intriguing sci-fi action movie. ‘Hostages of Mars’ on the background of such projects looks the most usual ‘soap’, in which artificially created conditions for the characters create an artificial situation for the clarification of relations.

Info Blu-ray
Video
Codec: HEVC / H.265 (57.4 Mb/s)
Resolution: Native 4K (2160p)
HDR: HDR10
Original aspect ratio: 2.39:1

Audio
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1
English: Dolby Digital
German: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1

Subtitles
English SDH, German.