Theme: Mars

Mars is the fourth planet of the Solar System. It has a long history in literary science-fiction, ranging from the Martian invaders of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds (1898) to the works of Ray Bradbury and the adventure stories of Edgar Rice Burroughs.

Mars has produced alien visitors since the early days of silent cinema. 1950s SF cinema brought a plentiful supply of Martian invaders. The same period also began a number of works about the exploration of Mars. Subsequent to that, we have begun to see a number of films about the colonisation and a little later the depiction of Mars as a world inhabited by humanity.

From the late 1990s, we have seen a concerted move towards the depiction of a scientifically credible Mars and realistic attempts to land on or colonise it. That said, there are still a number of films that conduct throwbacks to a romantic vision of Mars as a world inhabited by little green men.