Cats the world over breathe a sigh of relief as Curiosity lands on Mars. What will the NASA rover tell us? What will it find? Dust? Martians? The tattered remains of John Carpenter’s dignity? We humans had a real thing for the fourth rock from the Sun in the late 90s, ushering in a host of dreadful films about Mars whose Wikipedia blurbs end with ‘a critical and commercial failure’.