metropolitansales I gave it a 7.3 in my mind but marked it an 8 due to the year it was made and how it might have been if they had today's tech working for it.... Here we have a genuine Sci-Fi feature Mini Series that uses all the old Hollywood tricks of filming spaceships taking off , traveling, and landing, all with wires and toy rockets. You have to forgive it and open up your mind, give it a chance to play out and just go with it. The star-laden cast and story-line will pull it through for you. The era it was created is just before "Star Trek The Next Generation" and just after "Star Wars" the movie so it had tough competition in a young but rapidly widening outer space-opera genre. The heavy here is a 50-ish Rock Hudson playing the lead along with a hard working cast of TV series & TV movie regulars. The surprising part is how serious the cast is about their respective roles, there's no clowning around or rolling the eyes or goofy expressions, they take it seriously and it helps. Take a Sunday afternoon off and go ahead and watch it, if your a sci-fi fan and like your CG graphics you'll have to bend your standards and grin and bear it, but if your the casual sci-fi fan without great expectations, and like easy to follow scripts ,then this movie is for you! At the end you'll be glad you watched it.

drmaf17 I just re-watched this series after not having seen it for nearly 40 years and found the fond memories of it from my youth were not entirely displaced. It has some very good moments, the music is superb, the Martians look (and come across as) suitably alien without the need for elaborate make-up and the Martian city is very evocative. For all that the terrible science and awful 80's production values weigh it down so much. I really find it hard to take seriously a sci-fi series where people jet back and forth between Earth and Mars like there's an interplanetary bus service, alight on an unexplored planet wearing uniforms instead of space suits, or worse apparently making the interplanetary journey neatly dressed in the best of California casual. The Martian settlements look cheap and awful (would they really let towns on Mars look like particularly dicey truck stops?). Yet in between its cornier moment there are some really good things to like. Rock Hudson and Darren McGavin as the main recurring characters do a good job with a pretty hokey script, some of the scenes featuring the Martians are beautifully filmed and suitably evocative (Hudson's final dialogue with the ghost Martian is a highlight), and the whole "lets not mess up Mars like we did Earth" thing, which could have been corny, is handled well. There's enough here to keep you interested, even if you do want to bury your head sometimes at the awfulness of the special effects, I'm glad to see at least some of my youthful enthusiasm was not misplaced.

MartinHafer Back when it debuted on TV, I watched and enjoyed "The Martian Chronicles". Now, a bazillion years later (or so my daughters say), I decided to try watching it again for old time sake. Well, if you've heard the expression 'you can't go back', that pretty sums up what it was like watching the film. It just didn't age well and I found myself a lot more critical this go around. The main problem was the cheapness of the film. Even by 1979-80 standards, it was pretty poor and doesn't come close to the qualities of other sci-fi of the time. Poor matte paintings, crappy sets (such as how one colonist home on Mars looks just like any old home you'd see on TV--including the same crappy wallpaper--even though they JUST had started colonizing the place!) and shabby props do little to create the ambiance of Mars. Additionally, the story was VERY inconsistent--and I don't blame this on the Ray Bradbury short stories on which it was based. Some tales are haunting--others (such as the one with Joyce Van Patten and Darren McGavin) are just embarrassingly poor. What we need is a remake--a newer and better produced one. Overall, a very sad viewing experience, as I really, really wanted to like it.

Theo Robertson 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