THIS 90S GENRE MASHUP IS ONE OF TIM BURTONS BEST MOVIES

Tim Burton remains one of the most unique and imaginative filmmakers in history, with a distinctive style and vision that no other director can match. It isn't always perfect, as he's far better at world creation than narrative. However, his box office success has allowed him to put some amazing things onscreen, and his best work can stand up against anything Hollywood has ever delivered. Ironically, a number of his high points didn't do well financially, at least not right away. Examples include his beloved biopic of schlock director Ed Wood and his ode to balderdash, Big Fish.

Mars Attacks! has earned a place in those ranks, despite critical indifference and initial box office disappointment. It's not without flaws, as it rambles like a lot of the director's work, and its candy-coated universe takes some getting used to. However, few films in the director's canon are as singular or imaginative. Thanks to Burton, it hits the screens with a big budget, an astonishing array of stars, and a commitment to his one-of-a-kind sensibilities. That didn't help it during its initial run, but over time, it has attracted a loyal audience who fully grasp its vibes.

Mars Attacks! Started as Controversial Trading Cards

The Mars Attacks! movie is based on a wildly popular series of trading cards, first printed in 1962 and inspired by the cover of 1952's Weird Science #16 (drawn and colored by artist Wallace Wood) from EC Comics. They depict an invasion by a race of skeletal green Martians with enlarged brains, whose own planet is dying and who decide to colonize Earth before they go extinct. They launch a massive attack by setting human beings on fire with their death rays and reducing capital cities to rubble. The second wave of attacks involves giant insects, which the Martians enlarge before setting them loose on humanity. Despite these horrors, Earth fights back by sending rockets filled with soldiers to Mars, where they destroy the Martian civilization and end the threat at last.

The cards arrived at the height of the Cold War (the same year as the Cuban Missile Crisis) and tapped straight into the fears of nuclear annihilation and foreign invasion that were rampant at the time. Parents' groups and similar organizations were appalled by the 55-card set, which includes violent images of people on fire and being cut in half. The film's opening scene -- which depicts a herd of cattle set ablaze -- is lifted directly from the cards. The images could be genuinely frightening, which was part of the point. Its genocidal conflict is played straight, despite the surreal and often absurd imagery, and the underlying effect is a grim deconstruction of the 1950s myth of a happy suburban America. The uproar was sufficiently charged that the cards' publishers, Topps, declined to reprint the series for two decades after that.

Naturally, they became forbidden fruit for kids at the time, particularly those attracted to the kind of subversive content that informed Burton himself as a young man. That lent them a reputation that later allowed Topps to revive the card line in 1984, as well as licensing new merchandise and comic books. In 1994 a new card line entitled Mars Attacks Archives was produced, which added 45 more cards to the original 55 to bring it to an even 100. They retained the violence and gore of the original cards, but added a good deal of subversive humor to the mix. One card depicts a Martian menacing John F. Kennedy, for example, while another shows a Martian double-agent who uses a gigantic hairdo to hide its bulging cranium. Both make slightly revamped appearances in the Burton film.

Tim Burton Made Mars Attacks! as a Follow-Up to Ed Wood

Burton had just finished Ed Wood when he turned Mars Attacks! into a movie. He felt the material would make an excellent homage to Wood's low-budget sci-fi bombs, and patterned it after 1970s disaster movies such as The Towering Inferno. The director's reputation allowed him to assemble a huge cast of A-list stars, topped by Jack Nicholson in a dual role as the President of the United States and a skeezy Vegas casino owner, which provided the same epic scope as the card line.

The film jettisons the more brutal details of the cards in favor of a more openly satirical approach by embracing the implicit iconoclasm while toning down the violence and the genocide. Most of the movie focuses on various humans reacting to the Martians, revealing their foibles and failings in the process and turning the film into a surprisingly astute human satire. As expected, Burton sympathizes with the Martians more than the humans, who take active glee in the destruction of the vacuous ninnies laid out before them.

The Terrans prove remarkably slow on the uptake, which their enemy takes advantage of in hysterical ways. Unlike the cards that depict victory through a desperate assault on Mars itself, these Martians are finally done in by a Slim Whitman song. The survivors are tellingly Burtonesque misfits, underprivileged kids, single mothers, little old ladies, a banged-up mariachi band, and of course, Tom Jones. Annette Bening's flaky New Age-er makes a surprisingly sensible audience surrogate, as well as one of the few humans to revise her opinions of the Martians once they start annihilating everyone.

Mars Attacks! also benefits from the director's usual team behind the scenes. Colleen Atwood designs suitably weird outfits that neatly balance 1960s aesthetics, contemporary fashion and the weird ethos of the Topps cards. Danny Elfman goes full Bernard Herrman with his score by leaning heavily on the theremin and delivers one of the most memorable of his career. The end result is both a very funny sci-fi satire and one of the director's sharper digs at the worst qualities of his fellow humans. As an homage to the cards, it works exceptionally well too, not only with its multiple references to the original card art, but in the way it targets the same social forces that flew into such a panic about them in the first place.

Mars Attacks! Arrived at a Strange Time for Sci-Fi

Alien invasions had suddenly become trendy again at the time of its release, thanks to the enormous success of 1996's hit Independence Day. That film was pure popcorn fun, but also embraced a lot of logic flaws, plot holes and straight-up dippiness in its efforts to entertain. Burton never entirely lost his iconoclast's instincts, and Mars Attacks! was perfectly timed to give the reborn genre a proper pasting. Sadly, audiences didn't respond to the unabashed satire in a moment when people still preferred their alien invasions played straight. Critics pulled no punches in their comparisons, and even to this day, the movie is definitely not to everyone's tastes.

The satire, however, has held up far better than Independence Day, which celebrates the myths of bloodless victory and American exceptionalism. Mars Attacks! is having none of it, and even without the shocking qualities of the cards, it mocks its predecessor's narrative every chance it can. It understands the inherently distasteful nature of overkill, and chooses to embrace it as camp rather than pretending it isn't happening. The post-millennial world has validated its POV far more than that of the more popular Independence Day, which looks far more dated in comparison.

Burton's biggest trick has always been getting big studios to buy into his vision, which never comes easy and hasn't always resulted in a big win. Mars Attacks!, however, is far more subversive than perhaps any other film he's made for precisely those reasons. It uses the apparatus, star power, and budget of a huge sci-fi blockbuster to point out how pompous and silly they can so often be. More importantly, it does so with the wild and inventive vision that marks the director at his most memorable. Alien invasion movies have been parodied before -- sometimes quite effectively -- but never on the scale of Mars Attacks! and few with a director so clear about what the concept looks like to him. It's proven far more durable than its early detractors could have imagined.

2024-06-28T08:06:46Z dg43tfdfdgfd