Brian De Palma shelved the Hitchcock homages just long enough to ape another esteemed cinematic master — Stanley Kubrick — for a foray into big-budget sci-fi, Mission to Mars. The epic space odyssey aims very much to be another 2001 — the mystery is well in place; the pacing is deliberately slow; the feeling of reality is there.

And then he blows it at the end with a wholly unnecessary visit to Mars’ built-in planetarium and spook show, complete with crying aliens. It’s the same problem that plagued the endings of Robert Zemeckis’ Contact and James Cameron’s The Abyss. For God’s sake, when will Hollywood learn? Don’t show the mystic aliens!

But before all that, Luke Graham (Don Cheadle, Iron Man 3) heads an exploratory mission to the red planet that ends tragically, and only Graham survives. A rescue mission is deployed to save him, consisting of astropals played by Gary Sinise (sporting Maybelline MoistureLash), Tim Robbins, Jerry O’Connell and the delicious Connie Nielsen. Despite several obstacles — resulting, as expected, in the usual incredible De Palma set pieces — and even further tragedy, the team makes it to Mars. The scene in which Sinise stumbles upon a mentally unstable Cheadle in a makeshift greenhouse plays like something out of De Palma’s over-the-top Raising Cain, or some nonexistent film where the white man busts in on Bob Marley’s weed farm.

And soon this leads to the aforementioned Twin Peaks-esque trip to the “Golly Gee-Whiz” exhibit at the Mars State Fair, where all credibility is checked at the door for a laughs-aplenty sequence that clearly just should’ve been axed. But up until then, Mission is pretty damn good. It’s intelligent, well-made and looks fantastic. Too bad there’s That Goofy Ending, likely the culprit for the film’s punching-bag rep. —Rod Lott

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