OUR FAVORITE MARTIANS
By Owen Gleiberman
From Entertainment Weekly, 12.13.1996
In Tim Burton's Mars Attacks! (Warner Bros., PG-13), a silver flying saucer,
just like the ones that menaced American moviegoers in the 1950s, shoots out
its crablike legs and touches down in the Nevada desert. Out strolls a crew of
Martian soldiers, each with a grinning skull face, giant exposed brain lobes,
and glowering white eyes that dance around like overexcited cue balls. (Think
Michael Jackson in about 25 years.) "We come in peace!" announces their
leader (that is, once his statement is translated from what sounds to human ears
like "Ack ack ack!"). The citizens gathered in the desert break into
a collective grin of exhilaration. But the joke's on them. Within
moments the "friendly" Martians have whipped out their incinerator
guns and are gleefully irradiating everyone in sight. Take that,
earthlings!
Mars Attacks! may be the first sci-fi disaster movie that's also an impish
black-comedy prank. In Burton's giddily satiric epic, alien invaders want to
destroy the planet, but it wouldn't be right to say they're aiming for world
domination; they're more like demonic jesters out for a cosmic giggle. And Burton,
the maniacal pop fantasist, is on their side. His Martians have a rude, palm-buzzer
spirit that makes them successors to such Burton clown-devils as the
Joker in Batman or the grimy ghost in Beetlejuice.
Mars Attacks! is based on a series of Topps bubble-gum cards from the
1960s, and it's a true bubble-gum movie--it has no agenda but to delight you
with one eye-popping malicious jape after another. Burton affectionately skewers
the schlock of two eras: the space-invader fantasies of the '50s, with their
solemnly paranoid anxiety, and the let's-kick-alien-butt jingoism of Independence
Day. The very form of Mars Attacks! is a swipe at ID4, with
Burton setting up a cheeky cross section of '90s America--glib reporter (Michael
J. Fox), New Age 12-stepper (Annette Bening), trailer-home redneck (Joe Don Baker),
unctuous chief executive (Jack Nicholson), Vegas sleazebag (Nicholson again).
But the comic-strip collage lacks zing; if anything, it's as flat as the one
it's parodying. Turning his sardonic gleam on "normal" America, Burton,
it's clear, has no investment in these
characters, and so we don't either.
Still, if Mars Attacks! is more depersonalized than Burton's other work
(it takes a good 45 minutes to get going), that just means it generates a lighter
form of laughing gas. Burton stages the destruction of the world as lyrically
surreal spectacle. Even when the special effects are a parody of '50s cheesiness,
they have a funky, ramshackle beauty--the wonder of a puppet show that almost
looks real. Cackling away in their spaceship, the Martians graft the head of
a dim blond talk-show host (Sarah Jessica Parker) onto her pet Chihuahua. By
the time they've begun using the Easter Island statues as bowling pins, the film
has escalated into full Burtonian madness. We realize he's making up the rules
of destruction as he goes along, using his trip-wire wit to undercut the self-importance
of the blockbuster form itself. In its
nothing's-quite-at-stake way, Mars Attacks! has Tim Burton's flaked-out
spirit--it makes you feel like a very knowing 8-year-old, seeing through the
artifice yet believing in it at the same time. B+
