In the crowded 21st century it was decided to green (terraform) Mars so human life can inhabit it. We gave it moss and cockroaches. A crew of selected criminals and others go to Mars in 2599 to eliminate the roach problem. When they get there, they discover the roaches are large, humanoid, and aggressive. Rather than just kill them with conventional weapons, the crew resorts to injecting themselves with the DNA of various insects to give themselves a superpower as told by the narrator in order to make their superpower seem feasible and create Comic-Con outfits. No Caspar Van Diem with a machine gun...which at some point would have been welcomed.

When they were not engaged in fighting, they were engaged in boring dialogue. The character building was awful. No explanation of gravity in the ship, no delay in transmission to Mars...which varies between 4 and 24 minutes. This was more science fantasy than science fiction. A lot of heads being whacked off.

Guide: 1 F-word or so. No sex or nudity.

So yeah it's a Miike movie, but it also feels almost normal. Kind of formulaic in a way. Something you can sort of predict and see where it's going. Which is a weird thing to say about a Miike movie. But here we are (again). It's still fun, if you let yourself into it and just enjoy it for what it is (Miike light?).

So just don't expect this to go far out (even though it is mainly in space or beyond) and just take the weird character mix. This is almost like a film like "Man with the Iron Fist". The one RZA made, which is kind of a dream some Teenagers might have had. You know, throw in some ridiculous characters, let them do their thing. It's way funnier than the one RZA made of course, but still not masterpiece and certainly not something Miike fans might have been hoping for ...

Sitting on the couch "Terra Formars" just happened to be playing on my TV screen. I knew nothing of the manga series, but Takashi Miike's involvement - I thought I'll give it a shot and see what he would bring to the fold. The varied career of Miike, churning out films like no other. Each tonally different to the point you don't know what to expect. Sometimes you are picking up your jaw from off the ground, while other times you're left scratching your head and then possibly awe-struck because you're seeing something rather normal. Reading the outline for this film, it seemed like Miike could have fun. So in a way I wasn't too sure what was lifted from the source material compared to what was Miike doing his signature madcap craziness.

"Terra Formars" is downright nonsensical sci-fi pulp. A run-of-the-mill beginning (the dirty dozen in a futuristic set-up on a mission to the planet Mars) succumbs to a smorgasbord of heavy CG, bug morphing accompanied by a informative lesson on the insects the character become, hammy dialogues, ridiculously crazy fight sequences and volatile bug squishing. And I mean a lot of squishing! So it can get messy watching beefed-up humanoid cockroaches, humans and hybrid human-insects with their limbs tenaciously torn off, heads being snapped back and insides seeping out, but this messiness also included the minor storytelling. Characters and their story arches have no real clarity. They're thrown together in such a careless, rushed manner that when the deaths pile up there's little emotional impact. And most of the cast are killed before reaching the hour mark! From then onwards it only gets weirder and absurd in its denouncements, while giving a little exposition to remaining characters. Really the plot plays secondary to the on-screen action; set-piece after set-piece of cartoon-like CG activity.

Watch how the exterminators become the exterminated, as these hand-picked criminals dressed to impress in their space suits are facing something much more than your standard cockroach like first thought; as now they've evolved into humanoid killing machines intent of slaughtering humans.