Mars Attacks! Review
by Serdar Yegulalp (syegul AT ix DOT netcom DOT com)January 12th, 1997
MARS ATTAKS!
A film review by Serdar Yegulalp
Copyright 1997 Serdar Yegulalp
I admire Tim Burton as a director, even if I don't always enjoy his movies. THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS is a beautiful example of what can happen when his imagination is given free rein. MARS ATTACKS! on the other hand, feels like a dry run -- a $50,000 cheapie that someone decided to make for $50 million.
See, if MARS *had* been one of the cheapies it pretends to send up, it would at least have camp value. But this is a) an expensive Hollywood production by a director whose last project was a dramatization of the life and times of a director who made just such movies, so the results seem curiously dadaistic in a way, and b) an attempt to send up camp -- which is basically bringing coals to Newcastle. Campy movies aren't worth sending up because they have already done the job for you.
MARS is supposed to be campy, but it only manages to be a shaky imitation of camp. It also tries to be funny -- tries too hard, in my opinion, and is only funny in moments. As a whole, it's not funny, it's irritating, because it blows so many of its best moments by not bothering to develop them. For a movie that cost *that* much to make, it's astonishingly lazy.
One of the first things we see is lots of Martian flying saucers approaching Earth -- LOTS of them, in a nicely done CGI job. What struck me is that someone went to great, loving lengths to make the saucers look as much like a mid-50's bad-SF movie flying saucer as possible. It reminded me of Warhol's soup can paintings, somehow: we are at a point where just presenting an icon is supposed to evoke something: laughs. In this case, it's camp, but as I said before, sending up camp is something of a fool's errand. You can't kid a kidder.
The plot is about what you'd expect. The aliens come, there is some kind of diplomatic misuderstanding no thanks to a screwed-up translation machine, and the war is on. Actually, the movie is so clumsy in its handling of its plot that it's never clear if the Martians were just playing with our heads from the beginning, or if in fact the translation machine is screwed up, etc. Purists would no doubt insist that it's sort of beside the point, but the movie makes such a big deal out of some of these things in the first place that afterwards we wonder why they even bothered talking about them in the first place. To get laughs, of course, but the usual cliches about how the machine is "almost ready this time" aren't funny; they're hardly even groundwork for a good joke.
The biggest problem with the movie is the story, or lack of one. Any one thing that's funny in a movie is even funnier when it's given a context, and the contexts in MARS ATTACKS! were skimmed over, skimped on, or handled with a clumsiness that made me wonder if the movie had received some kind of major editing-room surgery at the last minute. Some of the scenes just drift off into space, or are so jarringly contrasted with others, that it almost feels like we're channel-surfing.
The Martians aren't interesting as villains, and the Earthlings that we get to see aren't that interesting as heroes. (An example: Rod Steiger plays a bullet-headed warmongering general. Period. No attempt is made to make his character *functionally* interesting: he's just an excuse for Steiger to indulge in the usual actor's business.) This is not the same as the DR. STRANGELOVE approach, in which everyone is more or less equally buffoonish; here, they're too dull, really, to be buffoonish. We don't see why the movie is wasting time with them.
I mentioned the effects are clearly expensive and very well-done, but they don't serve much more of a purpose than to frantically kick the movie in the ass and drive it along. Subplots come up, are re-examined in cursory and unsatisfying ways, and many of the scenes play out to no real purpose. As a result, every joke becomes a throwaway. The movie quickly reduces itself to a pattern where lots of cameo characters are set up in walk-ons, reappear to deliver one-liners, and then get annihilated when they meet Martians.
One good example of how the script wastes its time is a scene in which one of the alien bodies is being dissected. The entire punch line of the scene has the scientist character (played by Pierce Brosnan) sticking his hand into the alien's skull and coming away with a fistful of green slime. "Curious," he mutters. End of scene. This scene could have been a great source of laughs -- for instance, why didn't they take the chance to make fun of the recent "Alien Autopsy Footage!" scam? Now right there is one more funny idea, I bet, than most of the ones you could find in the movie.
Final score on the Martian scale: two rayguns out of four.
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