When DVDs were first developed, one of the exciting aspects about the format was that these shiny little discs would have a capability of including several audio tracks, alternate camera angles, DVD-Rom contents and interactive features.  Though many DVDs today do have commentary and foreign language tracks, there are not many that fully explore all of the possibilities that the format offers.  Mars: The Red Planet is one such disc.

This DVD is not a movie or documentary as much as it is a warehouse of images and information about the planet Mars.  When you fist pop the disc in, you are offered the choice between "Entertainment Mode" and "Interactive Mode."   The first plays a good portion of the information on the disc one feature after another, while the second lets you chose which section you want to view, and has a lot of extra features not available on the "Entertainment Mode" reel.

The approximately 90 minute long "Entertainment Mode" section starts with NASA footage of the launch of the Mars Climate Orbiter.  There is narration by the NASA command control giving speed and altitude information.  After this 5 minute piece, the rest of the film is taken up with views of Mars.  There are several scans of the surface of the planet taken from orbit.  Each one of these surface encompasses an entire rotation of the planet, smoothly scrolling across the screen.  There are three such section, and during these, you can select any one of the six surface scans available on the disc, and choose any one of six musical scores.  Between these orbital scans are slide shows of craters, volcanoes, mountain ranges, valleys, rifts and other interesting surface features.  There is also a slide show of various artists rendering of Mars, 33 paintings in all.  One rather odd segment has a picture of the entire planet, and at regular intervals "ice" is added to the picture, I assume to illustrate what Mars might look like if water were present in abundance.

The "Entertainment" segment ends with a computer animated segment straight from NASA illustrating how the Mars Lander would land, and how it is expected to function.

While all but the first and last  of these segments are playing, there is a musical soundtrack which consists of Ryan Shore's rendition of Holst's The Planets.  This arrangement was done totally with synthesizers, and while it is very well preformed, I have a bias against electronic classical music.  It just sounds sterile and tinny to me.  I can understand that the publisher couldn't afford to hire a full orchestra, a five piece ensemble could have provided a much superior sound track in my opinion.

Over on the Interactive Mode side, you can access all the footage found in Entertainment Mode, plus much more.  There is also:

Missions:  A text based feature, it contains a international listing of all missions to Mars.  On most of the missions (a few from the early 60's are missing this feature) you are able to access a page that lists the goals and results of each mission, the launch date and other technical specifications.  Each page has a picture, and if you highlight it you are taken either to an image of the space probe, or video of the launch.  A couple of the later missions have NASA animation explaining the purpose of the probe and how it will accomplish its tasks.
 
Interactive Maps:  This feature presents a globe of Mars that you can cursor around on, and zoom in on any section you'd like.

Planetary Videos:  In addition to the view seen in Entertainment mode, you can access a text page about Mars, and its two moons, Phobos and Deimos. Highlighting the picture on the text page and pressing enter will blow the image up to full screen size.  The pictures of the moons were very good.

Surface View:  A series of images taken by the Mars Pathfinder.  There is both a 2-D and 3-D 360? view of the surface.  (One pair of 3-D glasses are included.)  In addition there is a menu where you can highlight various rocks and see either a hi-res 2-D or 3-D image.  The 3-D effects were very effective.  I wish some of the other 3-D movies I've seen looked half as good.    These effects will really impress anyone who views them.

Gallery:   Text pieces about the artists and each of their paintings.

In addition to all of these features, there is also a preview of DVD International's other title, Earthlight.

This DVD has a lot of very interesting images from Mars, if you are a big Mars buff, you'll have hit the mother lode with this DVD.  The major flaw with the video though, is that the casual viewer will not get a lot out of it.  The pictures of Mars are excellent, but how long would the causal viewer want to see the surface scrolling by?  The slide shows of surface features again are interesting, but after a while you start wondering what you are looking at.  They label the pictures with the longitude, latitude, altitude the picture was taken from and name of the area, but not what the features actually are.   Watching this entire DVD does not greatly increase someone's understanding of the planet or its features.  If there was an audio commentary by a NASA scientist or planetary geologist, that would have greatly increased the amount of knowledge that one could gain from this disc.  As it is, it's very pretty to look at, but not much more.

The audio quality was excellent.  I didn't care for the synthesizer sound track, but the sound quality was excellent.  The music was in Dolby Digital 5.1 and full use was made of all speakers.  The music surrounded and enveloped you.  On the surface view section, there was a disquieting wind blowing through the speakers that gave the images a desolate and lonely feeling.  Very effective.  There was not distortion, hiss, or other audio anomalies present.

Video:

The video was stunning.  Seeing the surface of another planet in such detail was surprising.  All of the video and still pictures of Mars originated with NASA, of course, and they looked much better here than I've ever seen them before.  The details were crisp and clear.  You could make out very fine details on many of the rocks and craters.  Just amazing.  There was some very slight encoding errors on the planetary orbital scans, where some very fine details would shimmer slightly as they scrolled by.  It was barely visible on my 36" television, and on anything smaller I'm sure it would be unnoticeable.

Final Thoughts:

An exceptional collection of images from the planet Mars.  Unfortunately, this disc is marred by the electronic classical music, and the lack of information about what you are actually viewing.  Even so, the picture and audio quality, not to mention the frequent use of multiple sound tracks and multi angle viewing, make this a very impressive DVD.  People who've been bitten by the space bug should run out and buy this disc now, but people with a more casual interest in the red planet should Rent It.