Review of Mars Attacks! (1996) by Stuart K — 01 Feb 2011

One of Tim Burton's most underrated films, and probabily the most tongue-in-cheek of all, after the biopic Ed Wood (1994), alot of this feels like the sort of film Wood himself would have made, and it's also Burton's funniest film to date, and he does well with the lo-fi sci-fi on display.

It's a multi-layered story, focusing the activities of a number of people, (from the US President James Dale (Jack Nicholson), to people working in Las Vegas, to trailer trash in Kansas), and how the visitation of martians from Mars affects them all, especially when the martians display a nasty, savage sense of humour, and things turn nasty, and how the people of Earth survive, especially when one elderly grandmother has an unlikely secret weapon.

The film is a wonderful homage to old B-Movie sci-fi films of the 1960's, only this one is done on a much larger budget, and it has an all star cast, (including Glenn Close, Pierce Brosnan, Danny DeVito, Tom Jones, Sarah Jessica Parker, Rod Steiger, Michael J.

Fox, Martin Short, Jack Black, etc.) It's a very savage and very funny alien invasion film, if only more sci-fi films could follow suit. Oh, and this was better than the other alien invasion film of 1996, Independence Day.