Mars Attacks!

 Somewhere in depths of the Internet, a review exists of Mars Attacks!, Tim Burton's high-budget flop, suggesting that critics re-evaluate the universally derided movie.  On the strength of that review, I took a look at Mars Attacks!, a film that I probably had seen in fragments over the years, a scrap of footage here and there on the Cable, something glimpsed before I turned to another channel.  I'm as much influenced by reviews as the next person -- indeed, I labored for half my life under an idiosyncratic canon of movies imposed upon me by Pauline Kael -- and, so, I stayed away from the Burton picture.  In fact, the failure of Mars Attacks! was so spectacular that  it ousted Burton from his throne as post-modern King of meta-movies -- that is, pictures appealing the viewer's nostalgia for the guilty pleasures of their youth, bad movies, in other words, remade to have a patina of respectability.  With Mars Attacks!, Burton lost his cachet and became just another journeyman director, skilled enough but nothing special.

Alas, Mars Attacks! is not much better than it's reputation.  It catches a certain snarky Zeitgeist from the complacent mid-nineties, a mood best exemplified by a large-scale shot of downtown Manhattan with the towering hulks of the Twin Towers looming over the waterfront -- it's astonishing how big these things were and how utterly out of place they seemed.  Mars Attacks! channels low-budget 1950's horror films complete with the weird effect of devoting millions and millions of dollars to making itself look lamentably cheap, inept, and poorly made -- the Martians are depicted as giant brains with  glaring eyes and the bodies, when revealed, of shaved cats, are a particular example of a fortune spent to produce an intentionally unpersuasive and low-budget effect.  (The critters seem to be animated.)  The fact that the film harkens back to the 1950's micro-budget sci-fi features is diagnostic of the peculiar mood that the picture captures -- the fifties were complacent and conformist and, so, it seems, were the mid-nineteen nineties, everything becalmed under aegis of an unthreatening New World Order.  Burton manages to make1996 (I think the film is ostensibly set in 2004) look as retrograde and hapless as 1955.  

Mars Attacks! is inoffensive and mildly amusing.  It has a few interesting scenes, although the movie's nostalgia for the fifties genre films that it imitates flattens everything out and neutralizes the traces of satire in the picture.  Watching the film, one is struck by how mild it is -- this was before twenty years of the War on Terror, before the United States became the world's number one torturer (and was proud of that status), before the economic crash in 2008 and 2009 established our bankers and financial institutions were criminal, before prime-time TV shows like Succession used the word "fuck" in every single line of dialogue (Burton doesn't use the word at all)  and, of course, before Trump -- that is, B. T. a line of demarcation  in American politics that will stand as the 1914 of the new Millennium.   The film's satiric targets -- venal journalists, war-mongering generals, country-western music and Las Vegas -- are all broadly caricatured and easily mocked; we don't need a movie to make fun of Las Vegas -- it makes fun of itself.  Politically, the film's bugaboo is Ronald Reagan, surely a mild villain compared to Trump or, even, the dimwitted, and destructively inept, Biden.  As with the recent Netflix extravaganza, the film "virtue signals" (although no one would have used that phrase in 1996) -- this means that the picture is a little too smug for its MAD magazine style satire.  Just about everyone who had any pretension to be someone in Hollywood appears in the movie.  No one does anything much but "phone in" their performances"-- this is because the script is intentionally bad, full of shoddy, gimmicky dialogue.  There's nothing an actor can do with the stuff required of the players in this film.

The film's plot is rudimentary.  Thousands of Martian flying saucers emerge from scarlet crevasses on the Red Planet.  To the martial rhythm of a score that sounds Holst's Planets refracted through disco music, the saucers ("flying hubcaps" as someone says) make their way through space to Earth.  (Danny Elfman's exuberant score is the best thing about the movie.)  Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope, see the armada and report to the President (played by Jack Nicholson).  A suave scientist (Pierce Brosnan) assures the President that the space armada comes in peace -- he says that the Martians are an advanced civilization with superior technology and, therefore, peaceful.  (This syllogism is obviously flawed.)  The Martians land in the Nevada desert. They don't come in peace and start blasting everything in sight with their rifle-shaped phasers.  The plasma bursts from the Martian guns melt people's flesh away and leave them sprawled about as skeletons painted in various garish colors -- mostly blue and red.  The Martians who speak like ducks ("Ack! Ack! Ack! is all they say, although sometimes at length) seem to invite a meeting with a joint session of Congress.  Ridiculously, given the carnage in the desert, the President agrees to the session which results in all of the legislators being skeletonized.  (A computer translation system doesn't seem to work quite right -- at one point, it translates a speech by the aliens as having something to do with "suave shoes.")  The rest of the movie is a parody of fifties' monster films even to the point of unleashing Godzilla for some unknown reason on a city.  The Martians attack Las Vegas and Washington and bring their familiar monuments down; they even re-sculpt Mount Rushmore to replace the Presidents with their scowling bug-eyed visages.  There's lots of colorful mayhem that is not frightening or suspenseful in any way.  Pretty much all of the characters die.  As it turns out, the Martians have a vulnerability -- not the common cold as conjectured by H. G. Wells -- but an aversion to the yodeling of Slim Whitman, the country-western star.  As he croons, their bulbous heads explode into green goo and, so, Earth is saved.  In the last shot, a survivor makes his way home to a wrecked Washington D.C. where men driving front-end loaders haul away mounds of dead Martians. Burton doesn't know what to do with the premise and, once the Martians start killing everyone, the picture devolves into chaotic vignettes that seem totally capricious and whimsical.  At one point, the Martians can shrink people to bug-size and simply stomp on them.  A giant robot chases a pick up truck.  A group of heroic survivors, led by the pop singer and Las Vegas staple, Tom Jones (apparently Wayne Newton was busy) run around like chickens with their heads cut-off -- this subplot goes nowhere although it gives Jim Brown, the former football star (here an ex-boxer done up in a costume to make him look like an Egyptian pharaoh) and Mrs. Warren Beatty, Annette Benning, a chance to dash in circles while mugging fear and panic.  As in Dr. Strangelove, probably the most influential film of this sort ever made, Jack Nicholson gets to play two parts, President and a sleazy Vegas developer (married implausibly to Annette Benning playing a New Age adherent -- she meditates in lotus position as the aliens kill everyone.)  For some reason, the Martians like to perform grotesque experiments on captured humans -- they graft the head of her chihuahua on Sara Jessica Parker's body and preserve her head in a  jar; later the chihuahua now with Parker's head on it tries to make love with Pierce Brosnan's decapitated head -- trust me, it's not was fun as it sounds.  Slim Whitman's music is used in a derisive, patronizing way that would be offensive to many people if they recognized the sour condescension in this plot point.  Whitman's record with the yodeling is the favorite music of an old woman with Alzheimer's dementia -- the point being that no one would listen to this sort of music except those who are literally mindless.  Tom Jones is mocked as well but seems in on the jest.  At the end of the movie, he emerges from the Tahoe caves (!?) to see the lake full of wrecked space ships.  In a parody of a Disney film, all sorts of wild creatures flock around him (birds, deer, even a tortoise) while he sings "It's not unusual to be in love with anyone."  None of this makes any sense and seems purely arbitrary.

There's one short sequence that is actually funny and chilling.  One of the Martians made up like Marilyn Monroe with an enormous bouffant hair-do (hiding the creature's engorged cerebrum) slinks into the White House and seduces Martin Short (playing the President's press secretary).  She and her victim go into a fuck-pad hidden in the White House -- you access it by flipping up bust of JFK and pressing a red button.  The eerie-looking Martian sex-bomb is actually scary and this little bit of the movie, a throwaway like the everything else, has some of the creepy erotic charge of Scarlet Johansson's space-monster in Under the Skin.

The whole endeavor is questionable, along the lines of Burton's much better, if still pointless, Ed Wood.  Why spend millions of dollars to recreate bargain-basements films that were spectacularly awful, but, at least, weirdly appealing. Pouring millions of dollars into a "cult movie" just results in another failed Hollywood blockbuster and falsifies the entire project.  Vincent Price wasn't that impressive of an actor -- although he had his moments -- and he's nothing more than a nostalgic presence in Edward Scissorhands (also a much better movie).  What's the point in making something intentionally bad?  Badness if movies is easy.  It comes unbidden.