director
Tim Burton
screenwriter
Jonathan Gems
producers
Tim Burton
Larry Franco
cinematographer
Peter Suschitzky
music
Danny Elfman
editor
Chris Lebenzon
cast
Jack Nicholson (President James Dale/Art Land)
Glenn Close (First Lady Marsha Dale)
Annette Bening (Barbara Land)
Pierce Brosnan (Prof. Donald Kessler)
Danny DeVito (Rude Gambler)
Martin Short (Jerry Ross)
Sarah Jessica Parker (Nathalie Lake)
Michael J. Fox (Jason Stone)
Rod Steiger (Gen. Decker)
Tom Jones (Himself)
Jim Brown (Byron Williams)
Lukas Haas (Richie Norris)
Natalie Portman (Taffy Dale)
Pam Grier (Louise Williams)
Lisa Marie (Martian Girl)
Sylvia Sidney (Grandma)
Jack Black (Billy Glenn Norris)
Paul Winfield (Gen. Casey)
Christina Applegate (Sharona)
Joe Don Baker (Richie's Dad)
Barbet Schroeder (French President)
mpaa rating: PG-13
running
time: 106m
u.s.
release: 12/13/96
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
official
site
other tim
burton films
reviewed on this website:
- big
fish
- charlie
and the chocolate factory
- corpse
bride
- ed
wood
- planet
of the apes (2001)
- sleepy
hollow
|
The
first third of Mars Attacks! moves like molasses uphill
in January. Major stars show up, mostly playing broad caricatures,
and the audience chuckles politely, like the studio audience
during a bad Saturday Night Live sketch. My heart sank
as I thought "Oh, no -- this is really sucking."
But stick with it. Mars Attacks has a very slow fuse,
but once it goes off, director Tim Burton hits his stride. The
Martians land, and you can hear Burton cackling "Welcome
to Earth -- now go kill everybody!"
Mars Attacks! has been called both a spoof of last summer's
bloated sack Independence
Day and an affectionate homage to the cheerful sci-fi
of the '50s; it's worth noting that Burton's previous film was
Ed
Wood, about the notoriously inept director of Plan
9 from Outer Space (whose hubcap UFOs are spoofed here).
More than anything, though, it's a comedy of destruction -- Tim
Burton's version of Steven Spielberg's 1941.
There really is no plot. The ramshackle script (by Jonathan Gems)
sets up a dozen characters, ranging from the President (Jack
Nicholson) to a clerk at a donut shop (Lukas Haas), who are all
defined in terms of their response to the Martian visitors. Burton
assembles an all-star cast and then blithely kills off half of
them. Up yours, Hollywood! At times, the movie plays like a successful
director's revenge on the studio moguls who want him to deliver
another Batman.
The Martians, designed to duplicate the invaders in Topps' Mars
Attacks! trading cards of the '60s, are like E.T. redrawn
by Bart Simpson. Their heads are grinning skulls topped by big,
squishy brains; to be blunt, their heads look like testicles.
It's fitting that we almost get wiped out by the only species
more warlike and testosterone-brained than we are, and Burton
is at his funniest when the Martians are zapping away like brats
playing a video game.
He's at his worst with the human actors. Burton has never known
what to do with everyday people (see Kim Basinger in Batman);
here, he encourages everyone to ham it up. Nicholson is relatively
restrained as the President, but he also plays another role,
an oily Vegas land developer, and goes way over the top in a
fake nose that makes him look like Sonny Bono. Actors like Danny
DeVito, Rod Steiger, and Glenn Close (as the First Lady) seem
too aware that they're doing this as a goof.
Pierce Brosnan comes through. Playing some bleeding-heart egghead
who believes we can learn from the Martians (think Robert Cornthwaite
in 1951's The Thing), he acts with perfect pipe-puffing
seriousness and gets his laughs effortlessly. Brosnan also has
Burton's best funny-surreal moments when he's a disembodied head
making goo-goo eyes at Sarah Jessica Parker, whose own head has
been grafted onto .... Never mind.
Such moments make you forgive whatever's wrong with the movie.
Mars Attacks! isn't the psychotic cartoon many of us hoped
for; the first third is dead. But the last two-thirds are very
much alive, and very much Tim Burton. It's as if he'd started
making Independence Day and then burned it to the ground. |