Salon | "Mars Attacks!" page 2

"Mars Attacks!" page 2

“Mars Attacks!” injects the depredations of its verminous offworlders with some of the frolicsome, "aliens havin' a party" spirit of "Star Wars'" beloved cantina scene — and some of the prankishness of Burton's own "Beetlejuice." When a flying saucer guns down the Washington Monument and it looks for a moment like a troop of Boy Scouts is going to escape unscathed, the saucer zooms in to nudge the toppling obelisk the other way. When the Martians capture Sarah Jessica Parker's bimbo talk-show hostess and her chihuahua, they stitch her head onto her pet's body, apparently for the hell of it. They infiltrate the White House by snaring Martin Short's horny press secretary with a hilarious Martian hooker (Lisa Marie): a moutainous beehive hides her cerebellum, and she walks with the swaying arms of a fashion-runway robot.
The film accepts and embraces the vaguely artificial way that computer-generated figures move and turns it to good comic use: some of the invaders have a herky-jerky, sped-up gait, while the higher-ranking Martians glide smoothly, as if their robes concealed hoverjets. With their Keystone-Kops-meet-Nintendo nimbleness, their static-on-speed voices ("GAK BAK-GAK!!!!") and their protruding eyeballs, the Martians are the best thing about "Mars Attacks!" Their destructiveness is limitless but rarely disturbing; the crowds of people they zap — victims melt into either strawberry-red or lime-green skeletons — never seem to have much on the ball, anyway.
You don't worry too much about the victims' fate, since the "good guys" in "Mars Attacks!" are either corrupt narcissists (like the first family headed by Jack Nicholson and Glenn Close) or crudely sketched stereotypes (a trailer-park family with soldier and slacker sons). At best, the cast rises to inspired caricature (Parker, Pierce Brosnan's pipe-smoking professor, Annette Bening's New Age believer) or stolid Everymannishness (Jim Brown's prizefighter turned Vegas costume player). At worst they come off as one-note tricks (Rod Steiger's drop-the-bomb general) or pointless, fleeting cameos (Danny DeVito's cowardly gambler).
Nicholson doubles, for no apparent reason, as the chief executive and a good-ol'-boy Vegas developer. For the Oval Office role, you can see him trying to piece together Nixon's shiftiness with Bush's smugness and Clinton's smarminess, but it all just keeps collapsing into plain old mugging Jack, the jowly, eyebrow-hoisting trickster. If Nicholson can no longer contain the anarchic persona of his most popular roles, "Mars Attacks!" could have made better use of him: He could have been digitized and recast as the Martian overlord.
To one degree or another, the human characters in "Mars Attacks!" all share the ambient weightlessness that seems to infect Burton's work when he loses the balance between bombast and feeling, as in "Batman Returns" — the sense that everything's a put-on, and everyone's wearing a smirk.
Burton has said that the inspiration for "Mars Attacks!" lay in a collectors'-item series of Topps trading cards from 1962. So we're clued in from the start not to expect anything more than a romp through the B-movie attic, a goof on the likes of "Flash Gordon."
But there's a way to approach such pop artifacts that doesn't hail campy appreciation down on them from a high perch — that lovingly acknowledges their cruddy, plastic essence. Oddly, Burton himself successfully navigated this route in his last film, "Ed Wood," a biography of the low-budget auteur celebrated for classics of awfulness like "Plan 9 From Outer Space." Burton's Wood never allowed himself — or was incapable of imagining — a smirk; he believed in his cockeyed vision, however campily it might be appreciated today. And Burton's biography succeeded insofar as it, in turn, believed in Wood.
"Mars Attacks!" is unable to muster any such trust in its rickety plot or its characters. Its only faith is directed at the ever more overpowering ability of computer graphics to generate realistic, hyper-realistic and wackily unrealistic imagery. It doesn't bother to try to summon the sort of suspension-of-disbelief terror of Orson Welles' "The War of the Worlds" or its latter-day counterpart, "Independence Day." The best it can offer is the spitball of parody — as when it mocks "Independence Day's" famous right-hook to an alien invader by squaring off Brown's boxer against a whole platoon of Martians with their dukes up. By the time Tom Jones (playing himself) is leading the forces of resistance — employing a secret weapon discovered in another piece of pop-culture detritus — the film has collapsed into its own giggling triviality.
It's in the nature of films like "Mars Attacks!" that their trailers can sometimes make them seem far more appealing than they ultimately prove. A few glimpses of the amazing Martians, a couple of shots of the wild-eyed Nicholson facing off against his lunatic generals, and "Mars Attacks!" looked like it could be a classic of true satire — a '90s "Dr. Strangelove." It turns out to be more a throwaway piece of pop ephemera, like a '90s "Casino Royale," momentarily arresting and soon forgotten.