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The
struggle between science and religion is one that is played out all too
often on the pages of our SF books and the frames of our films. Every time you
turn around, there it is. Carl Sagan handled it beautifully in Contact,
and Antony Hoffman's Red Planet seems to aspire to those same lofty
ranks. But can so much be expected from a film featuring Val Kilmer? Is Chuck
Pfarrer's script able to deliver the goods? "By the year 2000, we had begun to overpopulate, pollute, and poison our
planet faster than we could clean it up. We ignored the problem for as long
as we could, but we were kidding ourselves. By 2025, we knew we were in trouble;
and began to desperately search for a new home: Mars. For the past 20 years
we've been sending unmanned probes with algea, bioengineered to grow there
and produce oxygen. We're going to build ourselves an atmosphere we can
breathe. And for 20 years it seemed to work. It looked like we'd pulled
it off. Then, all of a sudden, oxygen levels began to drop. We don't know
why." Chantilas: "Say we didn't try [going to Mars, saving mankind]. We just finished poisoning the Earth, and everyone was dead in a hundred years. Then what was the point of any of it? Art, beauty-all gone. The Greeks. The Constitution. We've been dying for freedom, ideas. None of
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