Mars Attacks!

with Jack Nicholson, Glenn Close, Annette Bening, Pierce Brosnan, Danny DeVito, Martin Short, Sarah Jessica Parker, Michael J. Fox, Rod Steiger, Jim Brown, Lisa Marie, and Tom Jones
Written by Jonathan Gann
Directed by Tim Burton (Warner Bros)
by Nik Rainey

Since Mars Attacks! is a Tim Burton picture, it’s an undeniable feast for the eyes – every frame is packed with visual invention and a bright, vibrant color scheme that puts the gauzy murk that passes for atmosphere in Hollywood to shame. But since it’s a Tim Burton picture, there’s not enough lying under the visuals and the brilliant casting to keep the mind from glazing over while the eye is otherwise engaged. Burton is quite capable of investing his absurd comedies with a soul, but when he does, such as in Edward Scissorhands and especially Ed Wood, which transcended its subject matter to tell a touching story of friendship between two doomed misfits, it tends to tank at the box office.

So instead of pushing further into human alienation, he hangs back and gives us real aliens that are, frankly, much more fun than the idiotic humans they end up charring into home fries. It’s the uncertainty of tone that makes this not nearly as much fun to watch as his most happily anarchic films (Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure and Beetlejuice) – it’s less the big-budget parody of ’50s red-planet-scare sci-fi that it should be than another all-star disaster movie too self-conscious to either hit its satiric target or provide the unintentional hilarity that Irwin Allen used to be so good at. But perhaps that’s just my high expectations talking – there are some very funny moments in this film, like the way Sarah Jessica Parker and Pierce Brosnan’s big love scene plays out, and I’m happy to see that he found the right role for his girlfriend, Lisa Marie, one that doesn’t require her to speak and plays up her, um, superhuman attributes. (This is actually the apex of Mars‘ emotional content – mopey-looking, chubby-cheeked comic-drawing geeks the world over must be heartened that someday, they too might have the personification of one of their exotic, massive-racked heroines to call their own.) But in the end, Mars Attacks! contains too many missed opportunities to be successful – to put Tom Jones in a movie with a bunch of raygun-wielding spacemen and not get him charbroiled? For shame.