Mars Attacks
When U.S. President James Dale (Jack Nicholson) learns that aliens from Mars are coming to invade Earth who should he listen to? General Decker (Rod Steiger) who’s just itching to start a nuclear war or General Casey (Paul Winfield) who is keen to welcome them along with Professor Donald Kessler (Pierce Brosnan) who wishes to treat the whole affair as a learning experience. Unfortunately for America and the rest of the world he chooses the latter two, with disastrous consequences. When the aliens finally arrive following their ‘we come in peace’ radio signal they obliterate the entire assembled crowd of TV reporters, officials, hippies and poor old General Casey. Kessler and TV reporter Natalie Lake (Sarah Jessica Parker) are taken on board the spacecraft and abducted. Whilst on board they are dismembered in some weird experiments yet kept alive by the aliens in little red sequinned underpants.
Having not learnt from his mistakes the President then attempts to communicate with the aliens again using translation equipment, asking them for a second chance of peace. From then on things go from bad to worse as the aliens return and wreak havoc by literally dissolving all of Congress, the President and anyone else in the way. The aliens are smart, underhanded and play dirty, one of them disguising himself as a beautiful woman in an attempt to infiltrate White House security and assassinate the President. More to the point, they seem totally indestructible, even against nuclear weapons. That is until they’re faced with the sound of a Jim Reeves record…
Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks! is filled with well known faces: Jack Nicholson (who plays two parts), Glenn Close, Annette Bening, Pierce Brosnan, Michael J. Fox, the list goes on with even an appearance from Tom Jones who saves the day for one group of survivors. The plot is pretty much ‘Independence Day’ but with more laughs. The aliens are all animated in a style to Jack Skeleton in Burton’s ‘A Nightmare Before Christmas’ despite being CGI creations. They were based on a series of trading cards from the 60’s which were at the time withdrawn due to the nature of some of the pictures (this is coming from a nation that thought Orson Wells’ ‘War of the Worlds’ was real!). The animated spaceships give the whole film a certain 50’s low budget B-movie feel to them. What really makes this film is the attention to detail - little incidental quirky scenes which make this a film really worth seeing. KT
Tim Burton is one of the very few directors working in Hollywood who doesn’t make bad films, and this is no exception. However, Mars Attacks! is his most accessible film for years, fortunately not at the expense of his unique vision. The film is filled with his truly inventive and deliciously dark sense of humour, not least in the way he sets about eliminating the majority of his profile cast. Although not his best work, Mars Attacks! is a brilliant and hilarious work even if it is ultimately unsatisfying. Given the recent popularity for sci-fi in Hollywood this is undoubtably the best yet and is acres better than ID4, the film it will obviously be compared to. spook
