Subject: REVIEW: MARS ATTACKS! (1996)

From: [email-masked] (Serdar Yegulalp)
Date: 12 Jan 1997 03:55:51 GMT

MARS ATTAKS!
                       A film review by Serdar Yegulalp
                        Copyright 1997 Serdar Yegulalp

I admire Tim Burton as a director, even if I don't always enjoy his movies.
THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS is a beautiful example of what can happen
when his imagination is given free rein. MARS ATTACKS! on the other hand,
feels like a dry run -- a $50,000 cheapie that someone decided to make for
$50 million. 
        See, if MARS *had* been one of the cheapies it pretends to send up,
it would at least have camp value. But this is a) an expensive Hollywood
production by a director whose last project was a dramatization of the life
and times of a director who made just such movies, so the results seem
curiously dadaistic in a way, and b) an attempt to send up camp -- which is
basically bringing coals to Newcastle. Campy movies aren't worth sending up
because they have already done the job for you.
        MARS is supposed to be campy, but it only manages to be a shaky
imitation of camp. It also tries to be funny -- tries too hard, in my
opinion, and is only funny in moments. As a whole, it's not funny, it's
irritating, because it blows so many of its best moments by not bothering
to develop them. For a movie that cost *that* much to make, it's
astonishingly lazy.
        One of the first things we see is lots of Martian flying saucers
approaching Earth -- LOTS of them, in a nicely done CGI job. What struck me
is that someone went to great, loving lengths to make the saucers look as
much like a mid-50's bad-SF movie flying saucer as possible. It reminded me
of Warhol's soup can paintings, somehow: we are at a point where just
presenting an icon is supposed to evoke something: laughs. In this case,
it's camp, but as I said before, sending up camp is something of a fool's
errand. You can't kid a kidder.
        The plot is about what you'd expect. The aliens come, there is some
kind of diplomatic misuderstanding no thanks to a screwed-up translation
machine, and the war is on. Actually, the movie is so clumsy in its
handling of its plot that it's never clear if the Martians were just
playing with our heads from the beginning, or if in fact the translation
machine is screwed up, etc. Purists would no doubt insist that it's sort of
beside the point, but the movie makes such a big deal out of some of these
things in the first place that afterwards we wonder why they even bothered
talking about them in the first place. To get laughs, of course, but the
usual cliches about how the machine is "almost ready this time" aren't
funny; they're hardly even groundwork for a good joke.
        The biggest problem with the movie is the story, or lack of one.
Any one thing that's funny in a movie is even funnier when it's given a
context, and the contexts in MARS ATTACKS! were skimmed over, skimped on,
or handled with a clumsiness that made me wonder if the movie had received
some kind of major editing-room surgery at the last minute. Some of the
scenes just drift off into space, or are so jarringly contrasted with
others, that it almost feels like we're channel-surfing.
        The Martians aren't interesting as villains, and the Earthlings
that we get to see aren't that interesting as heroes. (An example: Rod
Steiger plays a bullet-headed warmongering general. Period. No attempt is
made to make his character *functionally* interesting: he's just an excuse
for Steiger to indulge in the usual actor's business.) This is not the same
as the DR. STRANGELOVE approach, in which everyone is more or less equally
buffoonish; here, they're too dull, really, to be buffoonish. We don't see
why the movie is wasting time with them.
        I mentioned the effects are clearly expensive and very well-done,
but they don't serve much more of a purpose than to frantically kick the
movie in the ass and drive it along. Subplots come up, are re-examined in
cursory and unsatisfying ways, and many of the scenes play out to no real
purpose. As a result, every joke becomes a throwaway. The movie quickly
reduces itself to a pattern where lots of cameo characters are set up in
walk-ons, reappear to deliver one-liners, and then get annihilated when
they meet Martians.
        One good example of how the script wastes its time is a scene in
which one of the alien bodies is being dissected. The entire punch line of
the scene has the scientist character (played by Pierce Brosnan) sticking
his hand into the alien's skull and coming away with a fistful of green
slime. "Curious," he mutters. End of scene. This scene could have been a
great source of laughs -- for instance, why didn't they take the chance to
make fun of the recent "Alien Autopsy Footage!" scam? Now right there is
one more funny idea, I bet, than most of the ones you could find in the
movie.

Final score on the Martian scale: two rayguns out of four.
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[email-masked]                                             IRC: GinRei
http://serdar.home.ml.org                          another worldly device...
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