The Last Days On Mars Gets New Poster And Release Date

By Nick Venable | Published

This article is more than 2 years old

last days on mars posterIt’s a fantastic year for anyone who enjoys space thrillers, with Sebastián Cordero’s Europa Report bringing the terror to one of Jupiter’s moons and Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity will soon make outer space as scary as Jaws made swimming in the ocean. Closing out the year will be Ruain Robinson’s upcoming The Last Days on Mars, which just released a new poster, as seen above. Magnet Releasing has also unveiled when we’ll actually be able to watch the flick, and it makes a whole lot of sense. Possibly more than the film will make.

Those interested in catching the movie right away will be able to order the film through VOD on October 31. It’s a Thursday, oddly enough, so maybe you’ll want to wait until the weekend, when all your trick-or-treating is complete and you can sustain yourself on a sugar rush through Guy Fawkes Day. If you just have to watch it in a theater, you’ll have to wait until December 6, when the film will be pit against higher profile releases such as Scott Cooper’s Out of the Furnace and the Coen Brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis. This may not surprise anyone, but I’ll be one of the Halloween viewers, snack-size candy bars firmly in hand.

Now, how about that poster? It firmly sets Liev Schreiber as not only the most important character, with his helmeted face taking up half of the poster, but also the only star, as his name is the only one floating at the top. Granted, this isn’t the most marquee cast I can think of, but these guys are mostly veterans, just like Schreiber. If nothing else, this tells us that no one is safe from the film’s central threat.

The bottom of the poster features on astronaut seemingly running away from his fallen comrade, as seen in the opening shots of the trailer. It isn’t clear what’s wrong with the one on the ground, but I doubt he tripped over his own space boots.

The Last Days on Mars takes place in the titular time period, when a crew of astronauts falls prey to a bacteria that turns them into creepy-looking zombie creatures. Or something. Besides Schreiber, the film stars Elias Koteas (The Killing), Olivia Williams (Dollhouse), Tom Cullen (Black Mirror), Goran Kostic (Taken), Johnny Harris (The Fades), and Romola Garai (The Hour).

The rare sci-fi thriller to debut at the Cannes Film Festival, initial reactions for the film were middling to positive, giving it props for being a good-looking indie production, but taking points away for the increasingly by-the-book plot. The trailer, which you can watch below, certainly makes it look that way, but I’m still interested. Any movie with simple but disturbing make-up like this is always going to win me over.