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Critic Reviews
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The series deserves considerable respect for deftly balancing the two seemingly contradictory storytelling devices.
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Mars is interesting, and much more: Quirky, funky, earnest, intelligent, engaging and occasionally melodramatic.
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The format is ambitious, and if some parts don’t entirely work, there’s still a lot to like and learn in Mars.
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What Mars lacks in consistency, it makes up with scope and scale.
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The talking-head portion plays like a video Kickstarter pitch for Elon Musk’s SpaceX, his private rocket company determined to get man to Mars and keep him there in a sustainable community. The drama plays like a low-budget Ron Howard film, which it is, sort of.
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Favoring hard science over developing characters of any depth, Mars is an intriguing experiment that only occasionally achieves liftoff dramatically, yet space geeks will likely be in heaven. [7 - 20 Nov 2016, p.13]
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As the miniseries tells it, the tools necessary for settling Mars will need to be multipurpose: rocket boosters that can be deployed for multiple launches, interchangeable circuitry for mid-mission emergencies. Unfortunately, Mars itself isn’t as versatile.
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[Mars] sounds compelling, but it suffers from some of the same problems as big screen flops like John Carter and Mars Needs Moms: There's just nothing especially appealing about an endless red desert. [18 Nov 2016, p.52]
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Both the documentary footage and the staged footage set in 2033 smack of a generous budget; it’s easy on the eyes. But though the alternating elements get equal time, they aren’t equally interesting, and the series is engaging and frustrating by turns.
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The six-part event series obscures a reasonably engrossing, science-star-studded documentary about future exploration of the Red Planet with a far less interesting scripted drama about Mars travel that plays as basically The Martian without the personality or poop potatoes.
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The fictional half isn’t particularly sophisticated as space odysseys go. ... Where the series gets sometimes intriguing, sometimes awkward, is in the shifts to documentary mode.
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Mars feels somewhat familiar, but combining the fiction and nonfiction elements is an interesting attempt. Give NatGeo credit for trying something different. Whether this hybrid satisfies fans of either genre remains to be seen.
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Mars is a smart idea, and an educational one, too. But the factually dense production is not always able to accelerate from information to narrative.
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A weird attempt to blend documentary and sci-fi, Mars is an exquisite botch of both. Its only real accomplishment is to set back the reputation of executive producer Ron Howard to the days when he was murdering the mommies of adorable little baby birds on The Andy Griffith Show.
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 32 out of 70
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Mixed: 14 out of 70
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Negative: 24 out of 70
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Dec 21, 2016
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Nov 15, 2016This review contains spoilers, click full review link to view.
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Nov 17, 2016