I had high hopes for The Last Days On Mars. All of the signs were good. In the United States it’s distributed by Magnet Releasing, owned by that creepy overdog Mark Cuban but still importing a nice line of eccentric non-American B-movies, both good (Down Terrace) and bad (Donkey Punch), mixed in with a Malick and a Von Trier here and there. And look at this cast: Liev Schreiber, Olivia Williams, Elias Koteas – no lightweights there. Makes you suspect that there might be a decent script in there somewhere, harbouring enough juicy, lysergic, mind-bending ideas to make up for the budgetary shortcomings. Perhaps I was hoping for something like Duncan Jones’s soulful, melancholy Moon or maybe Soderbergh’s ice-blue Solaris (I wasn’t fool enough to expect Tarkovsky’s).

Last Days on Mars
Production year: 2013
Country: USA
Runtime: 91 mins
Directors: Ruairi Robinson
Cast: Elias Koteas, Liev Schreiber, Romola Garai

What I got was The Last Days On Mars, which is derivative and second-hand, and not in a good way. A small team of scientists preparing to end their six-month research stint on Mars discover what may be evidence of rapid-rate cellular duplication in ancient fossils that they’ve disinterred. Yes, there’s life on Mars, but it spells death for humans, as each is successively infected by a contagion that turns them into – and this is hard to type without a profound lowering of the spirits – psychotic Martian zombies that can’t be stopped and don’t need space helmets.

This is the moment when I stopped believing that The Last Days On Mars might somehow fight its way out of the constraining formula it had rather brazenly appropriated from Alien and The Thing: of the steady reduction, by increasingly horrific means, of a menu of delectable B-list character actors, the chronology of whose fate is determined by their bankability and familiarity in relation to the other performers. Which is to say the cast list is the story: it’s a spoiler right there on the poster.

But I was right about that cast. The script is B-minus at best, full of lines like, “I cannot believe this is happening!” and “You’re gonna make it!” (nope), but the leads lend it much more conviction and energy than it deserves. Schreiber always runs at full throttle, even when he’s standing still. He is the force holding the movie together. Williams seems to have specialised in Ice Princesses and Lady Hard-Asses since her toxic Cherie Blair in The Ghost Writer, and here she’s ferociously forthright and unpleasant once again. Both deserve better.

With Jordan’s desert substituting for the Red Planet, Last Days at least offers a persuasive Mars landscape, and a coherent future, with some plausibly bashed-about production design. The action and suspense sequences manage to be hair-raising here and there – there’s really no stopping these space-zombies – but the sheer grinding familiarity of what’s unfolding before our eyes starts to rot the movie from within.