Retro

Yeah, Red Planet and Mission to Mars were both released in 2000, and John Carpenter's Ghosts of Mars was released the following year.

Out of the three I've only seen Red Planet, which was considerably worse than Last Days On Mars and also based on some fundamental misunderstanding of science. IIRC it had a similar plot line regarding the discovery of some microbial life form which was tied in somehow with an effort to terraform the planet. It was as half baked as it sounds, so the writers also added a rover robot that -- for reasons never explained -- had a "military mode" and doubled as a war machine. Of course, it malfunctioned and started murdering people.

Here's a telling bit of info from Wikipedia, sourced to an article in the LA Times, about NASA basically taking a pass on providing scientific advisers for Red Planet because the film's "science" was such an inaccurate mess. When a funding-starved government agency that could really use the PR passes up on an opportunity like that, you know the movie must be a turd:

"Due to significant scientific inaccuracies, NASA refused to serve as a scientific adviser for the film. "The science was just so off the wall that eventually we felt, 'You guys go ahead and make your movie.' If there's something that's going to be so misleading to the public that we don't want to participate, then we'll say no," said Bert Ulrich, a NASA spokesperson, adding: "The big thing is, we want to make sure we're not misleading the public completely."[5]"