How true it is about the vast majority of SF films on Mars having some
kind of monster or other native life forms present. This includes the
God-awful Mission to Mars from 2000, directed by Brian de Palma no
less. That film was dreadful right down to the music. Red Planet, which
came out in the same year, was not much better, but it was often
tolerable and they did what I felt was a pretty good depiction of how
the Soviets might have built a Mars Sample Return lander.

Even Robinson Crusoe on Mars, which started out pretty good in terms
of depicting how a stranded astronaut might survive on Mars as people
understood the Red Planet in 1964, ended up dealing with aliens, one
of whom looked awfully human.

There was an early exception to this rule, though. In 1955, George Pal
(of War of the Worlds fame) came out with Conquest of Space,
which was based on the science factual books by Wernher von Braun
and Wily Ley, with the great artwork by the master Chesley Bonestell.

The film itself was alternately silly and actually depressing in many
parts, but the amazing thing for an SF work from that era was that
Mars was not inhabited, not even by lowly plants at the spaceship's
landing site. Nor were there any remains of an ancient civilization.
In fact I could not get over how accurate the planet's surface looked
compared to what we would find out decades later, right down to the
scattered boulders.

CoS is worth a look to see one of Pal's less known efforts and for the
attempt to be scientifically accurate in a SF film along the lines of
Detination Moon, released in 1950. No alien monsters there, either.