Directed by John Carpenter and staring Ice Cube and other people who should be rather ashamed of themselves.
Ghosts of Mars has no redeeming qualities. At all.
The single best word to describe this movie is concrete. As in, "bang your head against a concrete wall", "jump in a lake wearing concrete overshoes", "a concrete example of a bad movie", and "about as much fun as watching concrete dry". Not to mention the hundreds of tons of concrete that were horribly wasted in the making of the sets for this movie.
I knew from about 10 seconds into the credits that this was not going to be another Matrix. It wasn't even going to be Gone in 60 Seconds, which wasn't deep but was at least fun. No, I knew it was going to be pretty darn awful. I leaned over to JT and Alex (the usual movie crew) and said, "Okay, I've reset my expectations, this is going to suck, so lets see how much fun we can have with it." Unfortunately, the answer was... not a lot.
Credit where credit is due, though. The acting is passably good. Ice Cube is a little laconic but it fit, and Natasha Henstridge does a fairly decent job rescuing a character with no depth at all. Even the minor actors were decent, except for Richard Cetrone, whose only goal is to throw up his arms and scream and spout gibberish. But he's pretty good at that.
The cinemetography is middling. The scenes have a very distinct concrete shredded metal industrial style, and the camerawork captures it fairly well. There's a bit of overuse of cut-image scenery, where it would have been fine to let the extra 2 seconds between go. I'm guessing a lack of budget, because most films would have spliced a couple of angles together to cover filming goofs, but here they apparently just cut 'em with a very fast fade between for a sort of 'not quite stop motion' effect. The majority of the film is also framed as a series of flashbacks, a debriefing of Lieutennant Ballard after she returns from her encounter with the aliens. Mostly this is an excuse to repeat 5 or 10 seconds of lackluster footage several times to draw out the movie, as they flash back into the narrative.
As for the plot, I'm already trying to forget it. Something about windborne parasites that are the remnants of ancient alien Barbarians, who enjoy self-mutilation, cutting off people's heads, banging primitive weapons on their shields and making weird sculptures from wire and scissors and knives, that have been released from a mine by accident, and take over the Earthlings, except they can be kicked out of their host by the moral equivilent of a bad LSD trip, and are attempting to drive off the humans living on the incompletely terraformed Mars, which is incidentally run by a Matriachy, for no real apparent reason except to be different, but they don't even seem to mind the fact they turned a nuclear reactor into an atomic bomb. And yes, the plot really is slightly less coherent than that sentence was.
I won't even bother to go into the whole cliched aspects of the horror/action genre like "something weird is going on, let's split up and let it pick us off one by one". Or the whole aspect of various plot threads that appear, look like they might make the movie interesting, and then are dropped without even a word or camera shot, let alone a resolution. And the main characters losing their siblings and best friends to a demented game of Roadwarrior meets Tron with sawblade frisbees, and not even seeming to care. Ugh.
I'm not sure Ghosts of Mars would even make good Myster Science Theatre fodder, as it lacks the camp value that would make it fun to taunt. It's mostly just sad, like watching a 2 hour pilot for a bad television show on cable channel 450 at 3am. Even for it's genre it was horrible by mediocrity. Pitch Black with Vin Diesel was the same movie, but better in every conceivable way. Pitch Black was fun, scary, engaging, and had great dialogue and wonderful characters. Ghosts of Mars was just... a lump of concrete.
If you read this before going to see or rent it, save yourself the horror and humiliation of actually paying for the privledge. In fact, if even one person reads this and skips over it on USA network one lazy Sunday afternoon, that's a soul that might be saved in the long run.