Dr. Quinn Burchenal (Tom Sizemore) Original Spacesuit

To create a style for the Red Planet spacesuit, costume designer Kym Barrett, who previously designed the sleek, futuristic costumes for The Matrix, spoke to a number of people who had designed the suits used in actual space flight and then extrapolated their ideas into the future. "We wanted to have the feeling of something lightweight but durable, where you could almost see the layers of technology under the skin of the suit," says Barrett. "For instance, the suit looks as if it has its own cooling system inside. The irony of that is that we did, in reality, use a very archaic cooling system in an attempt to keep the cast cool, in some extraordinarily hot locations."

The suits themselves were made of a rubber fabric that was developed in New York. "It was a two-way stretch rubber fabric with a synthetic backing," she says. "That meant we could sew it; we could dye it; we could heat press it and do all sorts of other things that you couldn't do with most fabrics. It was a great material to work with and gave us a great result."

"Compared with the Batsuit. our space suits were a breeze," notes Kilmer wryly. "The Batsuit was beyond outer space. But in the space suit I could move, I could bend my knees, and I could hear what was being said to me. It was very hot inside the suit but somehow that made it all the more easy to believe that I had crash-landed on Mars and had to walk maybe hundreds of miles to find water, or to maybe die there. When your own body is in survival mode, it makes it that much easier to believe."

The most complicated design that Barrett had to work on were the space helmets: "They needed to contain active communication systems so the cast could hear the director. They also needed a cooling fan system to keep the visors from fogging and to help the cast feel that they weren't about to suffocate. We fine-tuned them by trial and error. We had to make spacesuits that really worked, that had air, that had air conditioning, that had lights, that had fan-cooling systems. I got to talk to people at NASA...about technology that could allow the actors to do what I wanted them to be able to do, in the sense of freedom of movement, and to have it technically believable."

In addition to her creations for The Matrix, The Matrix Reloaded, and The Matrix Revolutions, Kym Barrett designed also the costumes for Gothika, starring Halle Berry and From Hell, directed by the Hughes brothers and starring Johnny Depp and Heather Graham. Her previous credits include Three Kings. Barrett was nominated for the CDG Award for Excellence for Costume Design for Feature Film – Period/Fantasy for her work in The Matrix. Baz Luhrman’s Romeo + Juliet served as Barrett’s first feature film as costume designer.

The costume includes a flightsuit, boots and an helmet.