end of movie'?'
ive seen this movie twice, but never got to see the end. could someone give me a brief summery of what happend?
shareI assume that anyone reading the message boards doesn't care about spoilers, but here is a warning anyway:
***Spoilers****
As one reviewer astutely remarks, the cast starts out 'stranded', they remain 'stranded' througout the film, and they are still 'stranded' at the end of the film.
But about 1/2 way in, the 'exploratory' party (the three astronauts who were deemed 'expendable' and sent on a one-way exploration trip to the nearest landscape feature that showed some magnetic and gravitational anomalies) find a weird habitat at the bottom of a huge canyon. It is marked with indecipherable runes and obviously built by ancient hands. This habitat somehow maintains air and temperature that allow them to survive. But two of the exploratory party (both the men) die in the process - one dies of oxygen starvation just before the party discovers the entrance to the habitat, the other dies when he stumbles into a part of the habitat where the technology doesn't maintain earthlike conditions and ruptures something important in the hard vaccum.
Although communications are statick-y, the surviving female astronaut (the blond) manages to reach the remaining pair on the ship (where they have discovered an unanticipated oxygen leak that spells their doom) and the brainy, whiny science guy and the emotional brunette waif manage to cover the distance to the habitat without incident (actually in a series of silent jump cuts).
They join the blond in a valley somehow maintained by the same mechanisms that somehow keep the habitat going, and find that it has 'air, potable water, and lichens that they can extract proteins from'. And then the three survivors basically squat down to wait for either rescue or death. They never discover who the Martians were (although they find some mummified reposing corpses), why or how they built the habitat, or how or why the Martians died.
Oh, and there's no moral, THE END.
No wonder so many American IMBDb viewers hate this movie. We waited nearly two hours to get to an amibiguous ending with the most tenuous hope imaginable...and we don't even like or admire these people (the blond isn't bad, but the other two bicker with each other and whine like preschool children).
They never discover who the Martians were (although they find some mummified reposing corpses), why or how they built the habitat, or how or why the Martians died.
I thought they did explain this. Mars was becoming uninhabitable to the Martian race, so the Martians, like the castaways, started pooling their resources into smaller and smaller confines to last as long as possible before dying. So, in a way I guess you can say the Martians were stranded on Mars as well. But then there was also that dialogue from the blonde when she came upon the first Martian corpse talking about how it had two arms and two legs and looked quite human but could only speculate on how it looked originally before decomposing. So on another level, you might imagine that the final Martian survivors somehow made it to Earth to maybe be ancestors to the human race. And to expand on the duality of both the castaways and Martians being stranded on Mars, Earth was the only lifeboat either could hope for. share