Subject: REVIEW: MARS ATTACKS! (1996)

From: [email-masked] (Bryant Frazer)
Date: 16 Dec 1996 16:00:59 GMT

MARS ATTACKS!
                       A film review by Bryant Frazer
                        Copyright 1996 Bryant Frazer

                                                     GRADE: A-

I'm not quite sure what to say about MARS ATTACKS!, which is
obviously the work of a deranged genius. When Tim Burton's
twisted alien invasion comedy really works, it's breathtaking
and hilarious in equal measure. And when it doesn't work,
it's just dull. I'm not even sure it works more often than it
doesn't, but where it counts -- that is, when this gleefully
evil invading force from the red planet gets down to the
business of blasting us to kingdom come -- MARS ATTACKS! is
brilliant.

MARS ATTACKS! is based on a rather unsavory series of trading
cards released by Topps in the 1950s, and it takes its cues
from the same sources as this summer's INDEPENDENCE DAY --
old alien invasion flicks, disaster movies, and big-budget
special effects extravaganzas. But unlike INDEPENDENCE DAY,
which was a painfully middle-of-the-road appeal to the
hearts, minds and wallets of America, MARS ATTACKS! has a
fully developed and very personal sense of wonder about it.
The big difference is that while INDEPENDENCE DAY celebrated
the resilience of human beings, MARS ATTACKS! portrays us as
the greedy and hapless schmucks that we are.

The title sequence is just splendid -- an incredible swarm of
flying saucers rises out of the canals of the Red Planet and
then storms Earthward through the solar system in formation.
The spinning metal saucers are dead ringers for the invading
forces of movies past, and their first appearance on the big
screen in combination with Danny Elfman's thundering,
theremin-driven score is absolutely jaw-dropping. It's so
overwhelming that, I swear to you, I had trouble breathing.

The movie lays low for the next 40 minutes. We get a glimpse
of the alien leader, resplendent in a purple-sequined cape,
when a television message is broadcast to the people of the
world -- naturally, the only way to communicate with
earthlings is to preempt our regularly scheduled programming.
But mostly, the first act is spent developing characters,
setting up mildly comic situations, and drawing a quirky but
dishearteningly drab picture of America according to Tim
Burton. It's a good thing that the most compelling
personality in the movie belongs to the aliens, because
Burton's just not interested in making more than caricatures
out of his human stars.

Anyone who comes to MARS ATTACKS! expecting to see a lot of
one favorite actor is bound to be disappointed -- with few
exceptions, these characters are dispatched as the film
progresses. Jack Nicholson is a lot of fun as the President
of the United States but fizzles as a sleazy Las Vegas hotel
developer. Rod Steiger does an amusing enough take on Dr.
Strangelove's Buck Turgidson, Glenn Close brings some star
power to the role of the First Lady, and Martin Short is a
Presidential aide who meets the Martians in the White House's
"Kennedy Room," a secluded nook where he unwittingly tries to
seduce an alien dressed up as a big-haired, pointy-breasted
sexpot (Lisa Marie, the Burton flame who played Vampira in Ed
Wood) -- in an earlier scene, it's made clear that the aliens
studied human sexuality in the pages of an old issue of
Playboy.

Sarah Jessica Parker hosts her own TV show and Michael J. Fox
is her newsman husband. The octogenarian Sylvia Sidney has a
funny part as the old woman who cackles, "They blew up
Congress!" and plays a decisive role in the defeat of the
alien menace. Jim Brown and Tom Jones are the film's
Vegas-based heroes, and director Barbet Schroeder (REVERSAL 
OF FORTUNE) has a funny cameo as the unfortunate French
president. Also on hand and underutilized are Annette Bening,
Pierce Brosnan, Pam Grier, Lukas Haas and Natalie Portman(the
latter two also show up in Woody Allen's EVERYONE SAYS I LOVE
YOU).

The real stars, of course, are the computer-generated
Martians, and they're fantastic. With bare brains glistening
atop their grinning skull-faces, round egg-eyes with red
pupils darting this way and that, these animated invaders are
malevolence incarnate -- Joe Dante's GREMLINS are the closest
equivalent in recent memory, but Burton's little monsters are
more inventive. The film's raison d'etre are the scenes of
crimes against mankind -- the most famous monuments of the
world crumble under the alien assault, Easter Island is
turned into a bowling alley, and the nasty little buggers
perform hideous medical experiments on captured humans. The
sheer level of mayhem is staggering, especially when the
aliens make their first attack, blasting human beings into
iridescent skeletons. Parents are urged to pay special
attention to the PG-13 rating -- it's earned.

The special effects vary from charming to astonishing to
deliciously cheesy, and at least a couple of shots of mass
destruction seem to have been engineered specifically in
response to INDEPENDENCE DAY, although MARS ATTACKS! was in
production long before that film's release. Cinematographer
Peter Suschitzky, who makes the most of Wynn Thomas's wildly
imaginative production design (Thomas helped define the Spike
Lee style), actually took time off from his MARS ATTACKS!
regimen to shoot CRASH for David Cronenberg. Cronenberg's
movie will almost certainly be more somber -- it won't be
released in the U.S. until early next year -- but MARS
ATTACKS! is surely a similarly elegant nightmare. This is not
a nice movie. (And which studio executive was duped into
giving Burton $70 million to make it?)

By setting the film's final scenes in the nearly empty,
holocaust-ravaged America that INDEPENDENCE DAY conveniently
avoided, Burton's invasion epic suggests that the world we've
got may not be worth saving until many of the people on it
are dead. The victims of his invasion are naive, greedy, or
disastrously self-absorbed -- and a good thing, too, since
the movie's wicked charm is dependent on our ability to take
this invasion partly as a wish-fulfillment fantasy. The
surviving cast members are the innocents and the
entertainers, who triumph by determining that the alien
invaders -- the ultimate elitists -- are actually susceptible
to the kitschiest strains of American pop culture.
Ultimately, this messy masterpiece is the year's funniest
comedy and a weird, winking affirmation of the power of the
people.
--------------------------------------------------------------
Directed by Tim Burton
Written by Jonathan Gems
Cinematography by Peter Suschitzky
Production Design by Wynn Thomas
Music by Danny Elfman
Starring Jack Nicholson, Glenn Close, Jim Brown, Tom Jones,
Sarah Jessica Parker, Pierce Brosnan
USA, 1996

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