FARMVILLE – As an avid life-long fan of both NASA and the motion picture industry it pains me to admit NASA's new movie about Mars absolutely stinks.

It's an atrocious movie and I cannot understand how anyone could have decided to make and distribute such rotten cinema.

The investors are surely regretting their epic mistake, and isn't Kevin Costner smiling now that his 1995 Waterworld is off the hook as the biggest-ever box office flop.

NASA's movie isn't going to make a cent.

Sure, it's received decent publicity. Made the cover of Time Magazine. But did you see how quickly it went to cable and satellite TV? Almost directly. I never saw it released to a single movie theater.

I've watched quite a bit of the film on NASA's channel but sometimes, in all honesty, it looks like nothing more than a still photograph.

The casting is terrible. I've seen better casting by three-year-olds at Holiday Lake.

There is only one on-screen actor and in some Star Wars-like robot costume playing a character named Curiosity, a kind of huge R2-D2 or C-3P0-wannabe rover.

But the acting is awful. During most of the film Curiosity just sits there, for hours on end.

There is no character development.

None, whatsoever.

The rover doesn't even rove.

Somebody told me they saw it move 23 feet once, quite slowly, but I must have been out getting popcorn.

I'm no closer to understanding Curiosity's motivation now than at the beginning of the movie several weeks ago.

The dialogue is equally awful. Every few hours you may hear some off-camera character called Mission Control speak some technical gibberish, but that's it.

Curiosity, the so-called star of the film, hasn't said a word.

I could write dialogue like that. And with both hands tied behind my back.

Seriously, and without bragging, watch me:

See. No dialogue at all, just a blank space. And I did that without typing a single word of conversation.

Don't even ask me about the special effects. They are infantile. They are not special and they have no effect.

No laser beams. No explosions. It's totally warped.

And-most unfortunate of all-there are no aliens or flying saucers.

How could NASA make a movie about Mars without aliens and flying saucers?

I haven't seen a single flying saucer and there hasn't been a Martian in sight.

No wonder this movie went straight to cable TV.

In terms of having nothing at all, this movie has everything.

With nothing visually appealing in the movie, one would have expected them to get the soundtrack right but the one thing NASA's film about Mars has going for it is consistency.

Along with all the other “nothings” in the film there is no soundtrack. No music, incidental or otherwise, simply the sound of silence.

Perhaps, we may wonder, NASA should have considered making the Mars movie an animated film.

Or perhaps not.

Because I can tell you that there is no animation in this movie at all and there is nothing to indicate NASA possesses even the remotest sense of where to begin.

This movie is lost in space.

Two big booster rockets down.