Director Ruairi Robinson sat down with The Hollywood Reporter alongside actress Olivia Williams (Anna Karenina, The Sixth Sense) to discuss their sci-fi thriller Last Days on Mars, which premiered at Cannes Film Festival yesterday:

The film, which also stars Liev Schreiber, follows a group of scientists on a martian expedition in search of evidence of life. Near the end of the mission, one scientist finds it, with dire consequences.

Reviews of the film have been fairly middling, with critics praising the performances, Robinson’s effort as a first-time director, and the production design but giving the film a thumbs down overall. As Variety’s Justin Chang puts it, the film never becomes more than a “murkily derivative sci-fi horror entry.”

Missions in search of alien life seem to be in vogue these days, though it appears there’s not a lot of optimism among filmmakers when it comes to encountering extra-terrestrial life. As we reported yesterday, Europa Report is due out later this year, and both it and Last Days on Mars have drawn extensive comparisons to both last year’s Prometheus and 2009’s Moon (though Moon is generally spoken of as a class or three above the rest).

Last Days on Mars is scheduled for a September 19th release in the U.K., but does not yet have a U.S. release.