Why Red Mars may prove unfilmable

The problem is Hollywood got badly burned the last time it went to Mars. Brian De Palma's Mission To Mars entered into a dogfight with Red Planet in 2000 and both burned up in orbit. It could easily be argued that the singular failure of these two films arguably ended six to seven years of Hollywood investment in 'straight' sci-fi movies. That lack of confidence won't do anything to get AMC's Red Mars the full-blooded funding it needs to realise Robinson's vision.

At a practical level, realising the scope of the opening book alone is a jaw-dropping prospect for a financier: a vast and increasingly terraformed planet; an enormous and luxurious space-craft bringing the first colonists there (and, most expensively, in zero gravity for the most part); ice-comets shattered onto the Martian atmosphere as part of a terraforming effort; huge cities arising as the population of Earth begins to migrate to the new colony, precipitating planetary and inter-planetary war; a landscape already on an unimaginable scale, in chaos due to war and artificial planetary conditions, with avalanches, floods and Dantean weather conditions; enormous 'moholes' bored into the red planet, miles wide and each home to a mini-civilisation... Red Mars is a visionary work in the purest sense, anticipating the promise and perils of spreading the human race beyond Earth's confines.

So TV's usual approach of building one big expensive set and having a lot of characters bore each other senseless in it for 16 weeks, might fall a bit short of the mark.

Some of the most fantastic, exciting and visual imagery of Red Mars would present a huge challenge even for ILM, even if there was a blank cheque to achieve it: the collapse of the sabotaged space-elevator is a staggering vision - 200,000 kilometres of mile-wide cable-car crashing down onto the surface of the red planet, wrapping itself twice around Mars and hitting with apocalyptic and burning force on its second pass, having gained speed and caught fire.

There are narrative and demographic problems too: the average age of the 'first hundred', the characters who thread the Mars trilogy and who are the first group of settlers on the planet, is around 45. In order to allow us to stay with familiar characters throughout a cycle that encompasses hundreds of years, Robinson invents a fictional gerontological treatment, effectively freezing the characters at the age at which they take it. But even when we first see them, this core group is well past the requisite age for the target demographic. Even half-way through the book, most of them are in their eighties, if scientifically well-preserved. By the middle of the following book, Green Mars, many are centenarians.

So apart from the usual problems of choosing the threads and characters to focus on in a multi-layered and highly-populated story, Hensleigh is also faced with the problem of making the core cast commercial in an era used to the pretty faces and sleek bodies of Battlestar Galactica and - shortly - Dollhouse.

I can't help but admire Quixotic efforts, but the admiration may quickly turn to derision both in myself and other fans of the Mars trilogy; based on history, we're expecting a small sub-set of plots and characters from the original, and based on the current economic climate, we're expecting that the production values will be disappointing at best.

I hope not. I would dearly, dearly love to see Red Mars realised on screen, with all the character development and visual effects mastery that it deserves. But the further away the project gets from the Cameron camp, the lower my expectations get. We'll have to see, I guess.