Tim Burton
Mars Attacks!

Lunatic and unpredictable, the line of success rarely takes the shape of a straight line on the Cartesian plane. Much more often, it resembles the crooked and unpredictable swerves of a drunkard on the street, about to vomit his soul behind the first dark corner that appears in front of him. In summary: luck. In reverse, bad luck. The fact is that there are movies that, without a particular reason or merit, circle and buzz around your living room during prime time like hungry sharks, and others that move sporadically and on tiptoe between 2 and 5 AM. I often enjoy rooting for the latter or for those films in general that receive less than they deserve. 

I open the door; it creaks with a sinister sound, and the dust goes straight into the lungs. The three thousand five hundred volumes of science fiction are the tanks that make it dance in the air, perpetually. My brother's collection, in which the complete series of “Urania” stands out. Seen from the outside, all properly and obsessively stacked, it makes an impressive figure. In reality, if we take out the books by Anderson, Heinlein, Matheson, Van Vogt, Asimov, Dick, and other sacred monsters worth reading, you can't even remotely imagine the countless nonsense present in this series, which captures the literary genre that exploded in the post-war era. Every now and then, I pick one at random from the indecent authors of the '50s and '60s: medicine against depression. Covers well beyond the limit of decency and plots that often see the professor/McGyver of the moment engaged in the dusty garage creating a time machine with a blender and little else. And I'll stop because I don't want to talk about the trash cyberpunk subgenre that exploded in the '80s and so on.

In 1996, just when Hollywood was committed to sponsoring the tacky and patriotic “Independence Day,” Tim Burton had fun with “Mars Attacks!” deliberately mocking science fiction and the new disaster film genre about to explode. For Burton's standards, the commercial response to this film was modest: a fairly spectacular flop, especially if you look at the names that make up the cast.
A fleet of flying saucers is at Earth's doorstep. It's blue, it's cute: they like it. The Martians are very human: deceitful, angry, ambitious, arrogant, and petty. Burton makes us laugh heartily by dressing these little skeletons in hideous greenish vomit-colored suits and arming them with terrible squirt guns that make every move of mass destruction lose credibility. It is therefore purely healthy, genuine, obvious, and entertaining satire against the aforementioned literary/cinematographic genre. Not only that. It also becomes a great opportunity to target U.S. society captured by an "impartial" alien eye.

Much like the Martians in The Simpsons, the little monsters with their oversized skulls enjoy revealing the mediocrity and ineptitude of humanity from every angle. And so, with gales of dark humor, the general ridicule starts by taking the protagonists to extremes well beyond the permissible, excellently portrayed by the cast within their exaggerations. Every character, therefore, represents a category and the spotlight passes inexorably. On the New Age movement sure that peace is the only "universal" value present and that, with an imaginary highway full of atmospheric candles, illuminates not only Mars but all the planets of the solar system; on military leaders à la “Dr. Strangelove”: grown-up adolescents eager to press red buttons indiscriminately; on the basest, most mawkish and pathetic patriotism with fluttering stars and stripes flags; on the petty, envious, and stupid world of mass media where appearing better and earlier than others is everything. Amusing is the portrayal of intellectuals/know-it-alls who, faced with the unexpected, display confidence and try to justify everything while having no idea what's going on. Total ineptitude on the part of the egocentric, powerful, and promiscuous political class. Opportunism and chameleonism for the capitalists, ready to rub their hands, for the arrival of aliens and the obvious market expansion. Counterbalancing everything is the overall celebration of "underdogs," the outcasts, the provincials with a simple approach who, in the end, will manage to save the world.

As usual, Burton gives us a delicious montage: especially in the scenes depicting the Martians with a rewarding, visionary, original, and obviously gothic work. The quality cast includes valuable cameos by M.J. Fox, DeVito, and Tom Jones, and the performances of Sarah Parker, the sharp professor Pierce Brosnan, and of course the presidential family formed by a fine trio Nicholson/Close/Portman stand out. Thanks to its compact duration, "Mars Attacks!" does not come across as repetitive or heavy. On the contrary, it flies irreverently for 90 pleasant minutes, without breaks and without any kind of letdown, thanks to a brisk pace. Even though it's not a masterpiece, nor Burton's best work, I believe it has been unfairly underrated and overlooked. I'll give it one more star for merit: because I find it sad that it airs rarely on TV, sometimes in the late-night slot, as if it were a bad porn, a B-series horror, or an Uzbek film with German subtitles.

ilfreddo