What's the difference, anyway?

Here you go, the complete list of differences between the movie MISSION TO MARS and the script to the movie.

Enjoy. 5.22.00

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The script starts with a flyby of Mars. We see the surface of the planet, and all of the features that make it interesting. We discover that this is, in fact, a "virtual reality" simulation being done at Jim McConnell's ranch in Texas. Jim, Luc and Woody are having a private Barbecue while discussing Luc's upcoming mission. (Think the treehouse sequence that appeared in the movie).

One big difference here is that the year is 2009, not 2020 as shown in the movie.

Also, Jim has the chance to view several photographs of his wife, at college, in training etc. This scene would later appear in the movie with Jim in his crew quarters aboard Mars 2 in route to Mars. We also learn that Jim's hobby is building and flying experimental ultralight aircraft.

We learn that, along with Luc, the crew of Mars 1 includes: Dave Materick, Ken Tobias and Nicholas Drake. There is no female component to this mission.

The script has a really nice transmission from the Earth to Mars and the crew of Mars 1 on the planet. If you remember, in the movie, there's a sudden jump cut from Jim viewing the picture of Luc, that Luc's son drew, of him on Mars. It was originally going to be handled quite differently:

THE CAMERA MOVES IN CLOSER, into the very eyepiece of the telescope (at the barbecue), and we see... MARS Just a small, HAZY RED DISK at this magnification. We HOLD on it, as we do, we see the haziness start to disappear. As we continue to HOLD, we begin to notice that Mars is growing bigger and bigger, and we realize that we are racing across the vast void between the two planets... MARS CONTINUES TO GROW. It soon fills the screen. Still we keep SPEEDING towards it. We BLAST through the high wispy clouds and GO DOWN, straight towards the rust-orange surface... The CLOSER we get, the more surface detail comes into view. Towering jagged CLIFFS, mysterious CRATERS, and strangest of all, trails of bright WATER-ICE FOG, writhing like ghostly snakes through dry arroyos... The same sort of fantastic landscape we saw earlier, in Woody's 3D simulation, only now with much more intense clarity, richer colors, stunning light. And finally we see SMALL SHINY DOTS, which get brighter as we plummet, resolving into the manmade structures of MARS ONE BASE CAMP. We see a DOT moving neat the base camp compound. It's an ASTRONAUT in an EVA spacesuit. We head STRAIGHT DOWN-for him. Just as it looks like we'll smash into him, the speed of our decent SLOWS, and as the CAMERA DIVES the last few feet it TILTS UP to look thorough the helmet faceplate of... LUC GODDARD

This would have been a very cool scene, but it was probably cut due to budgetary reasons.

The action on Mars takes place on the Chryse Planitia, not Cydonia as depicted in the movie.

The Mars 1 Operations Center is located in Houston, not in orbit aboard a space station as in the movie.