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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Take us to your leader - so we can blow him away !, 19 Jul 2000
It's difficult not to be fond Tim Burton's big-budget 50's sci-fi spoof Mars Attacks (1996).The lead actors were clearly having a real laugh whilst making this, with hilariously cheesy over-acting and some great one-liners. Amid the mayhem, you don't really care what happens to most of these characters anyway, most of whom come to a gory end, but towards the end of the film, you'll want to get in there yourself to sort out the vicious little Martian creeps. The admittedly shaky plot is pretty secondary to the excellent visual effects, and there is an eery 50's-esque score underlying the whole film, which is a good touch. The scheming, skeletal aliens have a genuinely nasty look about them, whilst also coming across as quite comic, and go about their murderous human annihilation / experimentation with a twisted glee. In fact they are the most unsympathetic aliens to have graced our movie-screens since H R Giger's ultra-aggressive 'Alien' back in 1979. The 50's B-Movie cliches are used to full-effect, with body-pulverising ray guns, saucer-shaped spacecraft and large-brained/puny-bodied aliens running riot throughout. You just cannot take Mars Attacks too seriously (as did the producers of Independence Day in the same year), so if you'd like to see half the US Presidential Administration and Chiefs of Staff wiped-out within 90 minutes, this is your movie !
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16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
WICKEDLY WACKY..., 5 Nov 2002
Tim Burton outdoes himself with this silly, but funny, spoof of 1950s flying saucer/alien invasion movies. It is absolutely zany and quite funny. There is also nothing politically correct about it, as there are no sacred cows. The film is totally irreverent of American culture and icons. Everything and everyone is fair game.Martians have come to Earth, and they do not come in peace. Diabolical and deadly, they are bent on wreaking havoc wherever they go with their death ray guns, which serve to incinerate living beings. These bulbous headed martians with their own brand of deadly humour are hell bent on destroying Earth, while laughing and cackling maniacally. The special effects are meant to to be reminiscent of those found in 1950s UFO flicks and in this it certainly succeeds. The cast is stellar with Jack Nicholson playing dual roles, that of President James Dale and that of entrepreneur Art Land. Glenn Close, Annette Bening, Pierce Brosnan, Danny DeVito, Martin Short, Sarah Jessica Parker, Michael J. Fox, Rod Steiger, Jim Brown, Natalie Portman, Sylvia Sydney, Paul Winfield, Pam Grier, Lisa Marie, Christine Applegate, Lukas Haas, and Tom Jones round out the star studded cast. With tongue in cheek performances, the viewer is bound to get a good laugh out of this film.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Ak ak ak aK AK! They came in peace?, 12 Jul 2006
Nasty, lying little brutes! Why, over the last (when did H G Wells write War of the Worlds?) 100 or more years have these vindictive hooligans kept attacking us? This time they pretended to be our friends. How did they know the "romance" and "pharmaceuticals" and rock and roll had turned us all silly - turned us into hippies and new age crystal-spinners who might be gullible enough to believe them?
It's a very funny film. I'm blessed (or cursed) with a childish sense of humour and that may be why 'Mars Attacks!' has such appeal for me. And there's a stellar cast here who must also share this unsophisticated sense of humour, judging by the way they abandoned all decorum and dived right in to their comical roles. (Every one of them deserved an award in my opinion.) Another reason this film appeals to me is that I grew up in the 70s when the world seemed to be full of those nice-but-dim folk who were looking for something to believe in and anything would do: benign space aliens, crystals, spirits, lay lines, pyramids - you name it. Those days have passed and now we just have SETI (the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) casting about for friendly aliens to come and show us the way. If they're out there, they'd better be careful, because after all these books and films that warn us of the consequences of trusting strange aliens, no doubt our governments will blast first and ask questions later. But what if nukes don't work? What horrible music, beloved of grannies will destroy our alien enemies? There's so much to choose from.
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