Subject: REVIEW: MARS ATTACKS! (1996)

From: [email-masked] (Michael Redman)
Date: 12 Jan 1997 03:55:01 GMT

MARS ATTACKS!
                       A film review by Michael Redman
                        Copyright 1997 Michael Redman

*1/2 (Out of ****)

The bubble gum cards that this film is based on were released in the
early sixties to criticism of their violent and explicit scenes of death
and destruction. Thirty years later this is played for laughs.

Tim Burton who gave us "Beetlejuice", "Batman" and "Edward Scissorhands"
attempts a difficult task: making a purposefully bad big-budget science
fiction film funnier than the unintentionally hilarious B films. How can
you outdo "Plan 9"? An admirable task, it's unfortunate that he doesn't
succeed. "Mars Attacks" starts off extraordinarily slow and doesn't get
much better.

Despite dozens of big name stars (Jack Nicholson, Glenn Close, Michael
J. Fox, Jim Brown, Tom Jones, Rod Steiger and many more), the one-joke
film falls on its face. With such a big cast, characterization is
difficult and here it's not even attempted. When the main characters get
fried one by one by the invaders, it's a big ho-hum.

Burton obviously believes that excess is the road to success, but in
this film it's just the superhighway to even more excess. Everything is
big and bright from the destruction of Congress to the red and green (in
celebration of Christmas?) glowing skeletons that remain after the
Martians scorch earthlings with their death rays.

There are a few amusing bits and excellent effects. But they're only
impressive the first time you see them, not the second, and certainly
not the twentieth.

The film does almost work on a conceptual level. True to its origins,
the movie sports grand visuals. Many of the scenes are borrowed directly
from the cards and look great on the big screen. The project is much
like a series of moving trading cards. Here's a cool picture -- the
stampede of burning cattle is breathtaking. And there's another. I'd
trade two of these for one of those. Just like cards, they look great,
but then what do you do with them?

In the best of all worlds, you'd take the images and design a humorous
engrossing story around them. We don't live in the best of all worlds
and what we get is a tedious movie with tiresome aliens that look like
the puppets they are in a story inspired by "Gremlins" as much as by the
gory drawings on cardboard.

The film goes from one vignette to another with little connection
between them. Remarkably enough for such a flashy movie, it moves at a
slothful pace. And it goes on and on and on and...

I'm perfectly willing to admit that there will be many who love the
film, but Burton lost me with "The Nightmare Before Christmas". Perhaps
I just don't get it, but I suspect that there's nothing there to get.
This is a movie that the subject of one of his films, Ed Wood, could
have made.

The microscopic bacteria recently found on rocks possibly from Mars show
more life than this film does. The search for extraterrestrial
intelligence continues.

[This was published in the "Bloomington Voice" 12/26/96. Michael Redman
can be contacted at [email-masked]]