Mars Attacks!

Part homage and part demolition job, Mars Attacks! is perhaps the funniest piece of giddy schlock heartlessness ever committed to film.

A holiday film with no conscience whatsoever, Mars Attacks! will make you laugh, it will make you cry, and it definitely will make you wonder about Earth's ability to defend itself in the face of higher life forms.

It may seem mean-spirited to complain that in the end Burton's spectacle is a bit hollow. But his genius has always resided in his ability to give depth and a curious, dark richness to the ephemeral fluff of his pop-culture memories -- this is all sparkly surface.

A stillborn affair that could have been -- and should have been -- a whole lot hipper and funnier. If you've seen the two- minute theatrical trailer, you've seen nearly everything that's worthwhile in the feature.

This messy science fiction comedy blows most of its inspired moments because of its mean-spirited, deafening siege mentality, which turns rich promise into a tiresome parade of half-baked skits. Hilarity never seemed so tedious.

It turns out to be more a throwaway piece of pop ephemera, like a '90s "Casino Royale," momentarily arresting and soon forgotten.

It's stingy at heart. Burton, who collaborated with British screenwriter Jonathan Gems, brings nothing of "Edward Scissorhands's" magic or "Beetlejuice's" wacky fun to this sadly empty exercise. Aimlessly plotted and blandly written.

bahhhhh classique je l'ai vu dans l'avion et j'ai bien rigolé tel un mask un humour fun ou des alien de mars viennent envahir la terre

Watching in 2025 its still surprising how little high budget vfx and a stellar cast is in producing a good film. Sadly the screenplay just doesn't know if its playing for comedy, spoof or action adventure sci fi. Instead we get an interesting if garbled mess. The iconic comic book imagery of the martians still looks great but this really is not as magical as it felt back in 1996.

Tim Burton gets thoroughly self-indulgent, with two or three dozen mixed celebrities along for the ride. Mars Attacks! is wacky, carefree and impulsive, with a pitch-black sense of humor and a penchant for cutting off primary characters' heads (or turning them into glowing skeletons, as it were) well before their stories have climaxed. The CGI effects are glaringly bad, even by mid-90s standards, but that may have been the point. Burton, fresh off his Ed Wood biopic, clearly wasn't ready to wave goodbye to the sub-genre of the chintzy '50s sci-fi meatball, so he composed this tidy, self-aware little love letter to further scratch that itch. It's still appropriately satirical and funny, in the director's typical far-off-the-beaten-path style, though the gags and puns don't benefit from multiple viewings... even if they're spread out over the course of several years. Everyone involved, both on-screen and off, radiates with an authentic sense of self-amusement, and that's enough to make things work when they really, honestly, have no business doing so. Updated thoughts after a 2024 re-watch: Fleets of stainless steel flying saucers deliver a race of comically short, physically hideous alien killjoys to Earth, where they promote peace and brotherhood but then immediately set to disintegrating anything that moves. That includes most of the absurdly star-studded cast, which features Jack Nicholson (in two unrelated roles), Pierce Brosnan, Sarah Jessica Parker, Michael J. Fox, Martin Short, Natalie Portman, Glenn Close, Danny DeVito, Jim Brown, Tom Jones and a very young, crew-cutted Jack Black. It’s camp with a side of chaos, the kind of silly, slapstick sci-fi throwback that could’ve only come from the mind (and, most likely, childhood toybox) of director Tim Burton. Converting a semi-serious 1960s trading card series into a tacky, darkly comedic motion picture, Burton maintains and expands the original spirit and aesthetic. There’s a sense of aggressive play to these Martians, who delight in exploiting their galactic neighbors’ efforts to appease and negotiate in the face of a brazen onslaught. They’re heavily armed court jesters, one-dimensional beings who exist solely to eradicate and have a laugh while doing so. That their armaments look so thoroughly ridiculous only adds to the irony of their utter domination. They slaughter us with the same gizmos we once hawked for five cents in the Fantastic Four ad pages. Mars Attacks! is a wacky ride, but an extremely thin one. The cast knows this, embraces and emphasizes it. They’re caricatures of archetypes, narrow roles that are juiced for every last drop of satire and then, often literally, thrown into the fire. Easy to see how much fun everybody had with the project - it’s painted on their faces - but, despite my love for the offbeat and unusual, I felt a little restless by the end. An expert mishmash of kitsch and big-screen bombast can only carry this single-note premise so far.

This movie is mean-spirited and not fun. It's based on some trading cards, and so it has a kind of retro fun factor, but it's just one of those things where Hollywood is going "Isn't this SO cool?" and it's really just not.

You know how sometimes when you revisit a movie after a long time, you discover that you can now appreciate that movie in a way that you just couldn't when you were younger? Well, that was not my experience with Tim Burton's “Mars Attacks!”. I just watched it for the first time since I saw it in theaters 25 years ago. I remember really not caring for the movie then, and I figured maybe I just wasn't sophisticated enough to appreciate its brand of camp, but it turns out that it is even worse than my memory served. Every single role in this film is filled by an A-lister, but no one is given any material to work with. Christina Applegate, who was coming off of 10 years delivering zingers on “Married… with Children”, has zero lines of dialog. Jack Nicholson is doing his best to vamp up 2 roles, but when the writers give him nothing interesting to do, it all falls flat. I laughed zero times during the movie (not even a smirk), and I appreciated none of the story beats. Just so you know where my allegiances lie, I tend to absolutely love half of Tim Burton's films, while I detest the other half. I think you know which category “Mars Attacks!” falls into for me. Whatever you do, do not watch this movie. It is so bad it is bad. Let's collectively forget it ever existed and watch “Ed Wood” instead. “Mars Attacks!” gets an F - Reserved for movies with absolutely NO redeeming value.