Tim Burton functions best when the budget is tight and content pushes him past his comfort zone. (In other words, not one of his ALICE films.) So why is MARS ATTACKS so much fun? The exception that proves the rule? It could lose a reel or two, but you’ll be giggling too hard to mind. Based not on a book (comic or otherwise), but on a series of TOPPS Chewing Gum Trading Cards*, story and tone largely inspired by ‘50s Sci-Fi (think THIS ISLAND EARTH/’55; WAR OF THE WORLDS/’53*). With a huge, unnecessary All-Star cast showing who can get their laughs within the agogic Burton rhythm (Jack Nicholson, Michael J. Fox, Martin Short, Rod Steiger, Tom Jones, Lukas Haas, Jim Brown, Pam Grier, and especially Sylvia Sidney can; everyone else can’t). But the film’s propulsion doesn’t come from smart dialogue, dumb gags or narrative inertia, but from its elegant high-concept design and lo-fi execution. Particularly out in space when enemy space craft ominously orbit Earth. Twenty years after STAR WARS, these may be retro toy models, but grandly purposed and displayed like the imaginatively painted box the scale model kits came in. Commercial artwork that both ignited and ultimately limited the Burton æsthetic.
READ ALL ABOUT IT/LINK: *The idea man behind the TOPPS card series, Len Brown, isn’t properly credited on screen, but did recently get this excellent NYTimes obit. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/25/arts/len-brown-dead.html?searchResultPosition=1
DOUBLE-BILL/SPOILERS/LINK: *Just as WAR OF THE WORLDS had the aliens defeated not by weapons of mass destruction, but by ‘the little things,’ viruses and such, so here, where they are felled by a double dose of sub-operatic kitsch: Rudolf Friml operetta sung by Grand Old Opry’s Slim Whitman. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2013/10/this-island-earth-1955.html https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/06/war-of-worlds-1953.html
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