Mars Attacks!

The bubblegum cards come amazingly to life.

Features: Jack Nicholson, Glenn Close, Annette Bening, Pierce Brosman, Michael J. Fox, Rod Steiger, Tom Jones, Lukas Haas, Jim Brown
Director: Tim Burton
Only a director as creative as Tim Burton (Batman, Edward Scissorhands) could make a movie out of a series of bubblegum cards* and make it work. Mar Attacks! is completely faithful to the cards--the bug-eyed Martians with their exposed brains, their penchant for decapitating people and keeping their living heads around as pets, their predeliction for catching people at the most inopportune times as they blast away. So the movie gets very high marks for keeping the faith.

* This was in the 60s--long before all those greedheads starting calling them "trading cards" and actually believing they're worth money.

Burton sets his characters up in three locales: Kansas, DC, and Las Vegas. The Martians land and then the spaghetti hits the fan. And what spaghetti it is.

With this type of a movie, you better have primo special F/X and Mars delivers in spades. The flying saucers have a wonderfully funky look-- complete with rotating midsections right out of Earth versus the Flying Saucers. The Martians are fantastical: ghoul faces which the F/X wizards have animated with quite a variety of expressions. They talk with an incomprehensible squawking, which is such a pleasant change from the typical Star Trek gee-isn't-it-great-we-all-speak-English- across-the-entire-galaxy crap. Even the way the Martians move about the screen has a nicely (dare I say it?) alien touch.

Everyone goes about their business acting in this flick and all comport themselves about as well as can be expected. It has so many characters that I can't help wondering if some of them shouldn't've been trimmed in order to concentrate on the remainder. Reason: the movie just lurches along. There's no real rhythm to it: movie takes a long time setting up the attacks and when they happen, it's such a constant storm of explosions that one gets quickly inured to it all.

Movie has several touches which have to be homages to War of the Worlds, which is fine with me. Burton also reunited his Bat-villians: Jack Nicholson (Joker), Danny DeVito (Penguin) and Annette Bening (Catwoman (well, almost, remember she was supposed to have played the Catbabe till her pregnancy knocked her up, err, out of the running))

Having said all this, I must say I was somewhat disappointed by the movie. It should have been funnier. The number of jokes bordered on the paltry. And those it has don't all work that well. So this is one of those Siskel & Ebert "qualified" thumbs up from me. Not great, but pretty good.

After all, the movie is based on bubblegum cards. Just what the hell did you expect?

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