Director Brian De Palma, who has built a career in part out of aping the style and substance of filmmakers such as Alfred Hitchcock, takes on hard science fiction for the first time in Mission to Mars. The film is an homage to classics like 2001: A Space Odyssey and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. But although De Palma shows considerable visual wit in Mission to Mars, the movie fails because of cheesy dialogue, excessive sentimentality, credibility-straining sequences and a truly cornball finish.

Though the filmmakers have tried to avoid the clichés of previous space travel movies, Mission to Mars feels much like its 1950s progenitors, especially Destination Moon. But its two primary segments--the high-tech rescue mission and the mystical third act playing off the myth of a face on Mars--fail to mesh into a coherent whole. The excellent cast has little to do but contend with the special effects, though Nielsen seems overmatched by the emotional demands of her role.

De Palma shows his trademark dynamic visual style with vertiginous camera movements, meant to convey the feel of zero gravity, and awe-inspiring vistas of the red planet. And the visual effects, by Industrial Light and Magic and Dream Quest Images, are eye-popping.

Throughout, there are echoes of Stanley Kubrick's masterpiece, right down to the design of the space helmets and ships, as well as in the carefully composed images. Such comparisons hurt M2M, which has none of Kubrick's subtlety or poetry. Similarly, De Palma has torn a page from Steven Spielberg's playbook for the last act of the movie, which is meant to evoke wonder and hope, but instead elicits derisive laughter.

It's too bad, because a lot of painstaking effort went into the making of this movie. The Mars mission, based in part on Robert Zubrin's books Mars Direct and The Case for Mars, feels like the real deal, and Ed Verreaux's production design, based on NASA-approved ideas, is top-rate. The verisimilitude is aided by the work of former space shuttle astronaut Story Musgrave, who helped train the actors in zero-gravity movement, among other things.