by Frank Calvillo
I still remember that Friday the 13th like it was yesterday. The last day of school had ended, Christmas break had begun, and I and my best friend at the time headed straight for the movie theater to watch what would become a treasured holiday classic for me, Tim Burton’s delightfully outrageous Mars Attacks!
Based on the cult trading card collection and inspired by the many invasion movies of the 1950s, as well as the ensemble-filled Irwin Allen productions, Mars Attacks! follows a group of colorful and wacky individuals as they try to stay alive once it’s discovered that martians have invaded earth. The wildly eclectic cast includes Jack Nicholson (in a dual role as the President and a trashy Hotelier), Annette Bening, Glenn Close, Sarah Jessica Parker, Pierce Brosnan, Danny Devito, Natalie Portman, Martin Short, and Michael J. Fox, among many others.
Production-wise, Mars Attacks! is quintessential Burton. The energetic Danny Elfman score, the loud, striking visuals, and the kind of tongue-in-cheek humor that could only exist in a Burton film, all work like a symphony to bring the madcap sci-fi comedy to life. Its hard not to recognize and embrace the kind of humor Mars Attacks! is going for whether in its dialogue, such as when Nicholson as the President, states, “I want the people to know that they’ve still got two out of three branches of the government working for them, and that ain’t bad!” or when the filmmakers are overtly sending up the very genre they’re paying tribute to, such as when a martian leader gets into a boxing match with a former prizefighter (Jim Brown).
When it was discovered that Mars Attacks! would be released during Christmas, Burton and his effects people went ahead and made the skeletons of all the martian’s victims red and green in the spirit of the holiday. Though the film flopped after being unfairly compared to that summer’s Independence Day, Mars Attacks! has in time come to be considered Burton’s cult classic, and its standing as a campy, off-the-wall comedy becomes more firmly established with each passing year. I remember living in London a few years ago and catching a screening of it in a local cinema. I for sure thought that I would be one of only a handful of attendees that night, but was totally blown away to discover an almost packed house with people anticipating upcoming scenes and laughing at the outrageous nature of it all, including the hilarious way the martians are defeated. When the screening ended, the thunderous applause nearly drowned out the Tom Jones music playing over the credits.
Yes, this is the time of year to once again to dust off the old holiday classics, which means people losing themselves in their wonderful lives and their miracles on 34th street. Yet if any of them want to challenge the idea of Mars Attacks! being worthy of inclusion alongside such staples, all I’ve got to say to them is: “Ack ack, ack ack! Ack!”
