One cannot make steak with a hamburger budget. I wish this lame attempt to bring one of the greatest Science Fiction novels to the screen had the budget for hamburger! Badly directed, terrible effects and sets, horrible cast with the exception of Darren McGavin and Bernie Casey, this is a horrible attempt. Just bad enough to be on the SyFy channel today. Really. I wish IMBD. would give in and let zero stars be a rating.

THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES is an Anglo-American miniseries vaguely remembered with some affection by those who saw it on its broadcast in 1980 . Having seen it again it's a fairly entertaining SF epic about the colonization of Mars by humanity , something that might have still seemed possible on it's original broadcast but now seems dated in its optimism . It's also a miniseries that suffers from some blatant flaws One of the major flaws revolve around Ray Bradbury's original source material . It's not a novel as such , more a collection of vignettes and short stories published in the 1940s by Bradbury and as such such the miniseries doesn't have a central plot . Adapter Richard Matheson does try to bring a linear structure by making Colonel John Wilder a linking device but the fact remains there's not a central structure to the story . In many ways it's similar to James A Michener's Centennial except it's set on Mars and the parallels to the colonization of the New World are maybe a little too obvious to be entirely successful .. Characters come and go but often don't contribute much to the story and disappear never to appear again . It's not helped that the cast list is the same for every episode . The vast majority of the cast just appear as cameos The cast themselves are very uneven , so much so that the acting veers from the very good to the embarrassing that a viewer may suffer from seas sickness . Darren McGavin is okay as Sam Parkhill second in command of the third expedition to Mars but is laughably bad when it's revealed he now owns a hamburger joint on a Mars freeway . It's one of those camp cowboys characters that only exists in cheesy American TV series . Nicholas Hammond is very wooden as Captain Arthur Black . His mission to Mars finds himself landing in " Illinois " and he seems only slightly puzzled by this . Oh he landed on the wrong planet and he's only slightly puzzled , a highly unlikely reaction . Perhaps the two best performances are by Fritz Weaver as a idealistic missionary who sees a vision of Jesus played by Jon Finch only for the missionary to realise " Jesus " is in fact a Martian . It's a beautiful scene about idealism , hope and soul crushing disappointment and one people can relate to regardless of their eccelistical beliefs and is probably the most memorable scene from the series Michael Anderson is probably best remembered in Britain as being the director of THE DAM BUSTERS , a classic war film with a legendary soundtrack . The one flaw with that film were the special effects and this is also a flaw with this miniseries especially much of the model work where the Martian sandships look like tiny models that are given away free with brands of cereal . This might have been down to the budget running out . The location work in Malta and Lanzarote must have cost a lot along with the actor cameos and you are left with the impression that late in the day the money run out . Whilst being never being up to the standard of THE DAM BUSTERS the soundtrack is memorable , very much love it or hate it and apart from the acting and model work the only serious fault Anderson makes is casting an attractive blonde as Geneviere Richard Matheson probably does his best with the original episodic source material . As stated Bradbury wrote his stories before science had any knowledge of Mars hence settlers can walk around a planet that has Earth like gravity and an atmosphere . One flaw that does seem unexplained ( Correct me if I missed the explanation ) is that the settlers are warned of an oncoming war and are evacuated back to Earth where they are wiped out in a nuclear holocaust . Certainly one of the main reasons for traveling to other planets - a view loudly stated by Prof Stephen Hawking amongst many other eminent scientists - is that " the eggs are no longer all in the same basket " so why bother going back to a planet that is about to become a radioactive cinder ? He does however make it very easy to empathise with the characters . The Martians themselves are very benign and only kill humans in order to protect themselves After a period of almost 30 years you might just find THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES a little disappointing . Maybe as not as disappointing as seeing Jesus only to find out he's not what he seems to be , but still disappointing nevertheless but this is mainly down to its dated values . It still has a high watchability factor however and has some entertaining moments and even if you're not a die hard SF fan you still might like o give it a chance

Really, the '70s, looking back now, seem like some mythic age when all seemed possible. Well, yeah, okay, there IS A degree of myth there and much of what the '70s really were was hardly paradise (the legacy of Vietnam, Watergate, gas crises, leisure suits, etc) but, for me, my lingering and increasingly nostalgic affection for the decade is largely forgivable on the grounds that I was a kid then and so a good deal of that affection is more a yearning for the simpler times of kidhood than any particular era's social or other trappings. Still, I think it's undeniable that some pop-cultural highs remain from the '70s -- look at all the truly great films made then, especially by what you might call the American New Wave (Coppola, Scorsese, Spielberg, etc) -- and if you were to look at any Top 40 chart from, say, 1973 you'd see that in those days some stellar music came right to you via pop radio, unlike the garbage on the Top 40 today. In those days, you didn't have to dig deeply to seek it out as you have to do now if you want to hear anything but committee-written, autotuned corporate pablum with synthesized backing music 'sung' by manufactured and largely interchangeable plastic stars-de-jour, country music these days hardly offering refuge 'cos it's mostly the same stuff with steel guitar and hats added. Besides, I'll never get over my devotion to the phenomenon known as "The Six Million Dollar Man," Big Jim dolls....um...ACTION FIGURES...and, yeah, that poster of Farrah. All this basically explains why I'm willing to overlook the '70s stamp that's all over this production. I'm not talking about the production values and special effects -- hey, they're a product of their time and the TV budget, and to their credit are not distractingly bad -- but the hair styles, flared pants, and uniforms that bear more than passing resemblance to the infamous leisure suit. And, yes, it's good to know that disco is alive and well in the piece's 2004 (actually, I guess disco really WAS alive and well in the REAL 2004, as it turned out, and flared pants even made a comeback...the miniseries is more visionary than it might have seemed had we seen it in the pegged-pants '80s). In fact, to me, the '70s touch is one of the cool things about this work.I have to say that, overall, the miniseries is pretty draggy. It kind of belabors a few points beyond all reason, using ('wasting' would be another word) precious screen time, and here I'd like to point out that I don't believe myself to be either especially short on the attention span side nor a product of the MTV Generation's need for quick cuts and rapid resolutions. From what I've read so far here on IMDb, even the book's author concurred on that point. I should mention that I never read the book(s) and I understand that some of the difficulties I had with this piece (like the totally illogical evacuation of Martian colonists to an Earth on the verge of global nuclear destruction) were in the source material. Yeah, it could have been speedier, and yeah it's stepped in the look and feel of its time, but I did come away from the epic with the word 'interesting' foremost in my mind. Not great, but not bad, either.There're some great actors aboard. When I discovered that watching this was going to be a lengthy exercise (I'd never heard of it before, though I'd heard of the book, and when I grabbed it at my local library I just figured it'd be worth risking two hours of my time to watch it) it was the list of credited actors that swayed me to watch the thing. Rock Hudson, a few years before his very unfortunate decline and demise, looks as rocky as ever but is never really fully engaged. He's not anywhere near bad, but he's not really pulling out all the stops (if you haven't seen it, I strongly recommend John Frankenheimer's "Seconds" if you have never seen the Rock as anything but a relative lightweight, acting-wise), but he sure looks good and carries about him that certain air of authority and gravity. Most of the other actors with substantial parts at the very least acquit themselves well, and it's great to see some of them in action (though some, like Roddy McDowell, get little play). Bernie Casey is, as usual, very good in his role that becomes more interesting just before he's taken out of the picture. Christopher Connelly as the increasingly flustered Average Joe and Bernadette Peters as the vain goddess combine to provide what may be my favorite part of this episodic compendium. The most excellent Darren McGavin, a few years out of Kolchak and a bit before "Christmas Story" is a real highlight, as always. He was a comedy classic, wherever he showed up, even in the most serious roles. A national treasure, no less, greatly missed. Nice to see Spiderman on Mars, too. Wasn't that a David Bowie project, Spiderman on Mars? Not all the acting is top-notch and, indeed, some of it (especially from secondary characters) is stilted and as cardboard as can be, basically a lot less convincing than acting in the average TV commercial (Keanu Reeves is Olivier compared to some in this cast).Overall, I'd recommend this for the patient viewer who's able to weather a bit of thumb-twiddling while waiting for some actor to deliver some portentous line or emotion that we already saw coming and have had explained to us once already, about five seconds before. It's...well, it is...it's _interesting_.

This film had a lot of good things going for it. Based on Ray Bradbury's novel, with the equally talented Richard Matheson doing the screenplay. A top notch cast including Rock Hudson, Roddy McDowell and Darren McGavin.So where did it go wrong. Well, first, the cheap special effects. I think they went with this because this was the post-Star Wars Science Fiction craze, but Star Wars had so raised the bar on special effects, that the tired models on wires method just wasn't going to satisfy anymore.Second, Bradbury's novel is a collection of short stories strung together with a common thread. Some of the stories were published previously, and Bradbury included them in an overall book. Matheson decided to play up recurring characters in order to give the story more of a narrative, including Hudson's character.Overall, it doesn't work. Bradbury's ornate writing doesn't translate well to the screen despite the best efforts of Matheson and the actors.