Review of Mars Attacks! (1996) by Bill M — 17 Jul 2017

Possibly Tim Burton's most underrated movie, Mars Attacks has it's fair share of problems, for starters the script is never as funny as you want it to be, the first forty or so mins the movie is almost shockingly low on laughs, the astonishing ensemble cast of stars, including Jack Nicholson, Pierce Brosnan, Glen Close, Anette Benning, Sarah Jessica Parker, Michael J Fox, Natalie Portman, Danny Devito and bizarrely Tom Jones, are all never really given anything to do (although the throwaway flippancy towards all these stars is part of the films cheeky charm) but once the martians land and all hell breaks loose, the movie becomes a carnival of blackly comic anarchy.

Especially in the face of todays blockbusters Mars Attacks seems particularly bold and odd, it presents the arrival of extraterrestrial life not as something wondrous or profound but instead met with bored indifference by everyone, theres a sour bitterness to the film and it's view on the apathy of humanity that becomes more apparent with re-watches.

In fact it is overall one of the most surprisingly nasty and subversive big budget movies of modern times, the galaxy of stars are given short shrift and variously decimated, mutilated, blasted and impaled by the movies real stars, the hilarious, giant craniumed martians, their merry mean spiritedness is infectious and darkly joyous.

So while it has issues, when this movie gets going it's massive fun, visually brilliant and inventive, full of insanity, carnage, destruction and A-list death. It's viciously subversive, strange, ambitiously huge and just great.