Claudio Carvalho A seven-man crew of international specialists formed by Commander Andre Vishniac (José Sancho); engineer Luca Baglioni (Vincent Gallo); doctor Jenny Johnson (Maria de Medeiros); astrobiologist Fidel Rodrigo (Joaquim de Almeida); pilot Susana Sánchez (María Lidón); geologist Herbert Sagan (Danel Aser); and pilot Lowell (Johnny Ramone) travels to Mars to explore the planet. On the arrival, Lowell stays in orbit in the mothership while the crew lands on Mars. However their spacecraft crashes on the planet and Vishniac breaks his neck. They learn that they are stranded in Mars and Lowell returns to Earth to bring a rescue team. Soon Luca calculates the oxygen, water and supplies and concludes that there are enough for only two of them survive until an eventual rescue team comes to Mars twenty six months later. They decide that the engineer Luca and doctor Jenny should be the ones to stay in the spacecraft due to their specialties. Susan, Rodrigo and Sagan wear their spacesuits to explore the planet and die. But while there is life, there is hope."Stranded" is an anguishing low-budget sci-fi developed in very slow pace that builds up tension. The plot is realistic and the pragmatic Luca is a hateful but coherent character. The beautiful cinematography shows the arid landscape of Mars as a hopeless environment for human life. The surprising conclusion gives hope to the survivors to be rescued one day alive. My vote is six.Title (Brazil): Not Available

Gin-ster As many have commented, the acting is "the pits." The captain is not the least bit credible, and the scientist is so over-the-top that he would never be approved by the "powers that be" to be part of a spaceship crew. Not that the others deserve Oscars either, but these two in particular stand out as utterly ridiculous as far as a poor marriage of actor and role. However, that having been said, you could do a lot worse. For those willing to endure those low-budget made-for-TV movies on Sci Fi channel, I suspect you would certainly find this quite watchable. It actually does create a bit of suspense, or at least curiosity, as to how it will play out. True, numerous elements of the story lack credibility - how quickly would real astronauts give up trying to find workaround solutions? (as the group here seemingly does instantly - didn't they see "Apollo 13"?) How readily would people agree, based on the captain's orders, *****SPOILER HERE simply march outside of the space ship to (presumably) certain death? And what about that hokey ending about finding an ancient Martian civilization? Well, okay, that was fun. Speaking of which, if you like "space stuff" and can endure low-rent acting, sets and seen-it-all-before story lines, you could do a lot worse than this film.

dunedain16 I originally rented this movie as something to watch while my mom and sister watched "Must Love Dogs" in the other room. Within ten minutes I found myself preferring the chick flick. The opening scene of the movie was all I needed to realize I had just wasted five and a half bucks. The film begins with a newscast in which a reporter sets the scene for the rest of the film. A good idea, right? Except that the reporter delivers in a deadpan. He says, "This is a historic moment" in a voice you'd probably expect to hear in a lecture on earwax. The rest of the movie follows this pattern to the point where I wanted to throttle the lead actress while screaming, "Have you even READ the script?" In short, I've seen beer commercials with better acting, better writing, better special effects, and better story lines.

Big Ox Like other viewers who left reviews, I didn't read the responses until after I watched the film. I've been sick in bed all week and, to occupy all my down-time, I've been watching movies I wouldn't ordinarily watch. One of those films, Planet Of the Vampires (a stylish, albeit campy, outer-space thriller in the same vane as Forbidden Planet), heavily influenced my initially reaction to Stranded: slow, deliberate, painfully dubbed, stagy, and staid--very, very staid. As other reviewers have pointed out already, the greatest shortcoming is the dubbing, which substitutes a dull and dispirited quality for what probably is a subdued psychological tension in the original language version. After the first thirty minutes, however, Stranded begins to find its groove, and it successfully stands apart from other films like it (namely, the Hollywood blockbusters riding the coattails of the Mars Rover missions).To begin with, the writing and the direction (by the film's lead actor, María Lidón) is worthy of the stage. The story is very much the material of a one-act play, as are the major sets. Because of that, viewers should be expecting something that, rather than being motivated and driven by plot, delivers a single, lasting psychological impression. There aren't any big special effects payoffs, except for the final shots of the film--which, once again, work to underscore the film's overall gestalt.As a result, I feel that adding this film to the growing pantheon of "mission disaster" flicks helps to fill an annoying gap in the genre. Because more and more Hollywood blockbusters displace complex story for special effects, and because more and more films of this genre are made as marketable products with safely researched demographics rather than realizations of artistically written scripts, I was pleased to see a film that eschewed the bells and whistles and emphasized character interaction. Obviously, it's a foreign-made film (from the point of view of an American film-goer), but the values of film-making it represents also peg it as a film foreign to the Hollywood template of movie-making. I'm not suggesting, either, that all Hollywood science fiction flicks are bad because they have some excellent special effects. And, in fact, some of the bigger-budget films, such as Twohy's Pitch Black, accomplish both strong visual effects and complex character interaction. It's just nice to see a science fiction film that is genuinely alternative and offers another important mode of storytelling. I recommend it, as something different.