Mars has fascinated filmmakers for more than a century. Long before spacecraft revealed what the Red Planet was really like, movies imagined it as the home of ancient civilizations, hostile invaders and strange alien creatures. More recently, Mars has become the setting for stories about astronauts, survival and humanity’s possible future beyond Earth.
Our selection of the best movies about Mars spans those different eras, from classic 1950s science fiction to modern space adventures. Some take place on Mars itself, while others feature journeys to the planet or Martians visiting Earth.
1. The Martian (2015)
The benchmark for modern Mars movies.
Ridley Scott’s adaptation of Andy Weir’s novel stars Matt Damon as astronaut Mark Watney, who is accidentally left behind on Mars after his crew believes he has died. With limited supplies and no immediate way home, Watney must use his scientific and engineering knowledge to survive.
What makes The Martian so effective is that solving problems becomes the adventure. Growing food, producing water and communicating across millions of miles are treated with the excitement normally reserved for battles and explosions. It’s intelligent, funny and one of the most convincing depictions of human exploration of Mars yet put on screen.
Watch this if: You want the best combination of Mars, science, survival and adventure.
2. Total Recall (1990)
Mars provides the setting for one of science fiction’s great reality-bending action movies.
Paul Verhoeven’s wildly imaginative film stars Arnold Schwarzenegger as Douglas Quaid, a construction worker fascinated by Mars who visits a company capable of implanting artificial vacation memories. Something goes badly wrong, and Quaid is soon caught in a mystery involving his identity and the Red Planet.
Total Recall imagines Mars as a rough industrial frontier populated by miners, rebels and mutants. It’s violent, funny and deliberately excessive, but beneath the action lies a clever Philip K. Dick-inspired question about memory and reality.
Watch this if: You want action, dark humor and one of cinema’s most memorable fictional versions of Mars.
3. Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964)
A remarkably inventive Mars-survival story made before spacecraft transformed our understanding of the planet.
After crash-landing on Mars, astronaut Kit Draper faces the basic problem suggested by the title: how can a human being survive alone on another planet? Finding oxygen, water, food and shelter turns Mars itself into the film’s principal antagonist.
Released in 1964, Robinson Crusoe on Mars arrived just before Mariner 4 gave humanity its first close-up photographs of the planet. Its Mars is therefore scientifically outdated, but that makes the movie even more fascinating today. It captures one of the final cinematic visions of Mars created before robotic exploration began revealing the real world beneath centuries of speculation.
Watch this if: You enjoy classic science fiction and survival stories such as The Martian.
4. The War of the Worlds (1953)
One of the defining Martian invasion movies.
George Pal’s adaptation of H. G. Wells’ novel relocates the story to 1950s America, where seemingly invincible invaders from Mars arrive on Earth armed with devastating technology.
The movie’s elegant alien machines and spectacular visual effects helped establish a template followed by generations of alien-invasion films. Mars itself isn’t the setting, but few movies have done more to cement the idea of hostile Martians in popular culture.
Watch this if: You want one of the most influential science-fiction movies of the 1950s.
5. Mars Attacks! (1996)
The Martian invasion movie turned into gleefully destructive comedy.
Tim Burton takes the flying-saucer movies of the 1950s and turns them into an anarchic comedy featuring cackling, big-brained Martians, colorful ray guns and an enormous cast of familiar faces.
Mars Attacks! isn’t remotely interested in realistic Mars exploration. Instead, it celebrates decades of wonderfully ridiculous Martian pop culture while simultaneously making fun of it. The result is one of the strangest and most instantly recognizable Mars movies ever made.
Watch this if: You like B-movie science fiction, black comedy and Tim Burton at his weirdest.
6. Cowboy Bebop: The Movie (2001)
A stylish vision of a future in which Mars has become another human world.
Set within the universe of the acclaimed Cowboy Bebop anime series, the movie follows bounty hunters Spike Spiegel and the Bebop crew as they investigate a deadly incident on a heavily populated future Mars.
What makes its setting particularly interesting is how ordinary Mars has become. This isn’t a distant wilderness awaiting its first explorers: it’s a developed world of cities, highways and millions of people. That gives the movie a very different perspective on humanity’s imagined future on the Red Planet.
Watch this if: You enjoy stylish animation, action and imaginative future worlds.
7. John Carter (2012)
A lavish adventure set on the Mars of early science-fiction imagination.
Based largely on Edgar Rice Burroughs’ 1912 novel A Princess of Mars, John Carter follows a former Civil War soldier who is mysteriously transported to Mars, known to its inhabitants as Barsoom.
The movie was a notorious box-office disappointment, but that reputation tends to overshadow just how much fun its enormous planetary adventure can be. Its Mars is filled with cities, flying ships, strange creatures and competing civilizations — a colorful throwback to an era when writers could still imagine the Red Planet as an inhabited world.
Watch this if: You want old-fashioned planetary adventure rather than scientific realism.
8. The Angry Red Planet (1959)
A wonderfully strange journey back to the Mars imagined by 1950s science fiction.
An expedition travels to Mars and encounters a world far more exotic and dangerous than anyone expected. Rather than the barren desert revealed by later spacecraft, this Mars is an alien landscape filled with bizarre life and vivid colors.
The Angry Red Planet is unmistakably a product of its era, but that’s precisely why it belongs here. Its imaginative creatures, unusual visual effects and completely speculative version of Mars capture the period when filmmakers were still free to populate the planet with almost anything they could imagine.
Watch this if: You love vintage science fiction and the gloriously weird Mars of the pre-space-probe era.
9. Mission to Mars (2000)
An ambitious Mars expedition movie built around exploration and mystery.
When the first crewed mission to Mars encounters a catastrophic event, another spacecraft is sent to investigate what happened and assist any survivors. The resulting journey combines the hazards of human spaceflight with a larger mystery waiting on the Martian surface.
Brian De Palma’s film divided critics, but its sweeping Mars landscapes, spaceflight sequences and sense of cosmic mystery have given it a lasting place among movies about the Red Planet. It’s at its best when simply conveying the scale and danger of exploring another world.
Watch this if: You enjoy space exploration stories with a strong element of mystery.
10. Red Planet (2000)
A flawed but entertaining survival thriller about humanity trying to make Mars habitable.
With Earth facing an environmental crisis, efforts are underway to prepare Mars for possible human settlement. When something goes wrong with the project, a crew is sent to the planet to investigate.
What follows is primarily a survival thriller, with Mars providing an unforgiving backdrop for a mission that rapidly becomes more difficult than planned. Red Planet isn’t in the same league as The Martian, but its combination of terraforming, exploration and survival makes it one of the more recognizable Mars movies of its era.
Watch this if: You want a straightforward Mars survival movie with a terraforming angle.
More Mars Movies Worth Watching
There are plenty of other trips to the Red Planet worth exploring once you’ve exhausted our top ten:
- The Last Days on Mars (2013) — a Mars expedition becomes a tense science-fiction horror story.
- Invaders from Mars (1953) — an influential 1950s alien-invasion movie seen largely through the eyes of a child.
- Capricorn One (1977) — not actually set on Mars, but a terrific conspiracy thriller about a supposedly crewed Mars mission.
- Ghosts of Mars (2001) — John Carpenter turns a Martian mining colony into the setting for an action-horror movie.
- Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (1964) — an infamous cult curiosity for anyone determined to explore the stranger corners of Martian cinema.
Why Has Mars Inspired So Many Movies?
Mars occupies an unusual place in science fiction because our idea of the planet has repeatedly changed. Early astronomers could see surface markings but knew little about conditions there, leaving writers and filmmakers free to imagine canals, vegetation and entire Martian civilizations.
Space exploration gradually replaced that mysterious world with a real one: cold, dry and covered in deserts, volcanoes, canyons and ancient geological evidence that liquid water once existed on its surface. Cinema changed with it. The inhabited Mars of The Angry Red Planet and John Carter gradually gave way to the astronaut-survival Mars of Robinson Crusoe on Mars, Red Planet and eventually The Martian.
That evolution is part of what makes Mars movies so interesting. Taken together, they don’t just show different fictional versions of another planet — they show how our own understanding of Mars has changed.
For the real story behind the Red Planet, explore our guide to Mars and discover the missions that have explored Mars.