Val Kilmer and Red Planet: Bad Movie, Good Marsupial Robots

Who knew Val Kilmer starred in a scifi movie with a robot on Mars? With Carrie-Ann Moss, Benjamin Bratt, Tom Sizemore, Terrance Stamp, and Simon Baker. No one knows… because Red Planet (2001) was a big budget flop and promptly memory-holed. But the AMEE robot anticipated NASA’s Perseverance and Ingenuity marsupial team by 10 years. 

The general plot is that Mars has been undergoing terraforming for the past twenty years because of the Ruined Earth trope, without sending probes or astronauts to check in. Suddenly the remote sensors indicate the terraforming is failing. Off go a motley crew of astronauts and specialists led by girl boss Carrie-Ann Moss, the no-nonsense Navy commander and only woman on board. The lander probe crash lands on Mars, and the astronauts are forced to rely on AMEE (Autonomous Mapping Evaluation and Evasion), the Marine Carps robot that is supposed to help them navigate. Along the way, the astronauts succumb to injuries, murder, and attacks from AMEE (who has now, of course, gone rogue) and swarms of an aggressive new life form that spontaneously evolved. Only Val Kilmer, the  lowly mechanical engineer mockingly nicknamed The Janitor, survives and wins the affections of Moss. 

As a viewer there is so much to hate on: a long boring opening narration, clumsy flashbacks, leaden philosophical dialogue, foreshadowing brought up twice in case we missed it, unlikable characters, and so many, many tropes poorly twisted together.

As a scientist there is even more to hate on, starting with the whole “we’re remotely terraforming Mars for the past 20 years and haven’t bothered to sent any probes or people to check in on it” plot. The blue green algae (which looks suspiciously like Cascade dishwater detergent crystals) is now mostly gone but- surprise- there is more oxygen in the atmosphere than the algae could have produced so the stranded astronauts don’t run out of air. The astronauts may not be carrying back-up oxygen- or water- but they have lots of power tools mysteriously stored  somewhere in their space suits. The Screamer-like life forms seem to evolved to cut up metal, a very odd objective function given there is no metal on Mars. The long list of technical errors that are totally not offset by the film supposedly getting the physics of extinguishing a fire in space correct (gving the movie overall a correctness score of about 1:100). 

The redeeming aspect of the movie is that the robot AMEE is interesting, at least in terms of morphology and multi-robot systems.  It is a zoomorphic robot with four limbs and too-many-degrees-of-freedom-to-count that endows it with a creepy Cirque du Soleil agility. Each of the four limbs ends in a multi-fingered hand that can either grip the ground for better traction in Mars’ high winds (yay). Or turn into buzzsaws (boo). More realistically, AMEE is a marsupial robot; it carries a small cylindrical drone (think the tube-launched Israeli FireFly drone or the US Ascent drone) using a Leonardo Da Vinci aerial screw design. 

Creepy AMEE robot with cylindrical launcher for tube-like aerial robot.

The idea of a marsupial ground robot mother carrying an aerial robot daughter to serve as a scout is an old idea and is most famously realized by NASA’s Ingenuity, the drone partner of the Perseverance rover. Unlike Ingenuity,  AMEE deployed its drone, got the information, had the drone return to dock, and then together they sprinted off to kill or maim its next target.  Docking solves the problem that the Ingenuity Perseverance team had- that Ingenuity with its experimental propulsion system could not keep up with Perseverance. But docking adds complexity in terms of precise maneuvering plus requires the mother robot have space for it to land and have extra energy to recharge the daughter- this is called “hoteling” in robotics. The pragmatic solution was to have Ingenuity not dock and try to survive on its own (which it did for 3 years). After all, just having Ingenuity fly in Martian atmosphere was a big accomplishment. Small moves, Ellie. Small moves. 

Ingenuity and Perseverance on Mars (NASA)

In terms of AI, AMEE is less interesting. It unfortunately succumbs to the “AI is a crapshoot trope”— When it gets shaken up  by a really crash landing, it goes into military mode where it is permitted to kill the enemy. (Because with all the expense of a Mars mission, there isn’t enough motivation or money to remove killer robot functions?) In military mode, it is supposed to use physical force to protect the astronauts, so what could go wrong.? Well, to AMEE nothing says “enemy” like your operator talking about cannibalizing you for parts. (Loyalty goes both ways, just saying.) AMEE takes this personally and petulantly begins stalking and attacking the astronauts as they travel first to the Mars Pathfinder rover (where they conveniently find a working radio) and then to a Russian Mars 96-like probe with the ability to launch only two of the three survivors into space to be picked up by the orbiter (hmmm… if the probe was able to do that, why hadn’t it returned the samples back to Russia, and, yes, this does sound familiar because The Martian covered the same territory though with scientific veracity and a compelling plot).  Fortunately, AMEE and the insectoids are no match for Val Kilmer, who is the only thing going for the movie by the end. 

Watch Red Planet because Val Kilmer will always be our huckleberry.  Then, as a reward, re-watch The Martian and be thankful for Andy Weir.  And maybe throw in Tombstone and my favorite Real Genius too. RIP Val!