Cinema: The Aliens Have Landed

Four astronauts are out for a stroll on the surface of Mars when a giant nozzle of red sand rises, snakelike, and sucks the life out of three of them. So NASA sends a second crew (Tim Robbins, Gary Sinise, Connie Nielsen, Jerry O'Connell). This solemn, often silly, sometimes beautiful space drama--surely the least facetious film of director Brian De Palma's career--echoes Richard C. Hoagland's 1987 book The Monuments of Mars. Hoagland postulates that the planet was once inhabited by superior beings who left their seed on Earth. The theory may not be hard science, but it can make for enthralling science fiction.

Mission isn't the space disaster its reviews suggest. It does dawdle over the astronauts' troubles on Earth, and the music smothers emotions it should underscore. One also wonders why an alien intelligence eager for interplanetary contact would kill off the first humans it encounters ("Sorry, wrong number"--ka-boom!). But the film hits its stride with a space-station jitterbug at zero gravity and a desperate stab at lassoing a bucking bronco of a resupply module in outer space. At the end there is real emotional grandeur in a meeting of minds across the galaxy. This isn't 2001, by a long shot, but for 2000, it'll do nicely.

--By Richard Corliss