"Red Planet is set in what was then the near future and now our present, and right away, it presents itself as a climate change movie. Humankind has been terraforming Mars remotely because aspects of Earth have just proved unlivable. So, a combined effort has been underway to send algae over to Mars to generate oxygen, but now it's stopped. Why?"
"Almost aggressively, Red Planet is a science fiction movie about scientific problems that can only have scientific solutions. This isn't to say that everything is 100 percent accurate, but there is a bit of The Martian fused with well before either of those stories existed. Carrie-Anne Moss, fresh from The Matrix, gets her big moment as Kate Bowman, the commander of a mission that consists of all men."
"This isn't to say that this is any easy job for her, and the movie reminds us more than once that men who want to go to Mars might want to do so to start the human race over completely. When the crew gets inebriated on homemade moonshine halfway into the trip, Santen (Benjamin Bratt) suggests that they could repopulate the human race on Mars, implying that Bowman would help in this process."
Red Planet is a Mars-set science fiction film framed around climate-driven terraforming efforts to save humanity by seeding Mars with oxygen-producing algae. The film positions its core conflicts as technical problems that require scientific solutions, channeling hard-SF problem solving reminiscent of later works like The Martian. Carrie-Anne Moss stars as Kate Bowman, the commander of an all-male mission that grapples with survival, interpersonal tension, and unsettling suggestions about repopulating on Mars. The movie aims for plausibility and scientific thinking while exhibiting uneven accuracy and characterization, resulting in a film that is flawed but not wholly undeserving of reevaluation.
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