Mars Attacks!
With Jack Nicholson, Glenn Close, Annette Bening, Pierce Brosnan, Danny DeVito, Martin Short, Michael J. Fox, Rod Steiger, Tom Jones, Lukas Haas, Natalie Portman, Jim Brown, Lisa Marie, and Sylvia Sidney.
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Most reviewers have been describing the movie as satire, but whether it’s the cold war or the present that’s being satirized is far from clear–and if it’s both, it’s still unclear where this movie stands in relation to the two. A similar form of ambiguity could be found in Ed Wood, Tim Burton’s previous feature, which oddly wound up making a failed artist of the 50s into a 90s hero–a kind of postmodernist transubstantiation that could only be carried out by altering both Wood and the 50s. Another significant though less obvious cross-reference is the 1984 film adaptation of George Orwell’s 1984–coscripted by the same English playwright, Jonathan Gems, who scripted Mars Attacks!–which was less postmodernist and more historical in the way it deftly incorporated 1948, the year Orwell’s novel was written, into its image of the future.
This movie’s most obvious and most acknowledged source is a series of trading cards briefly issued by the Topps Company in 1962; the fact that they’re rare and legendary today gives them some of the aura of Ed Wood’s features. The only other sources deemed worthy of mention in the press materials are “classic alien invasion films of the 50s and 60s”–an ambiguous cycle, since I can’t determine what the unclassic alien-invasion films of the 50s and 60s might be (are they all classics by definition?). Certainly the BEMs (bug-eyed monsters, in 50s SF lingo) in Mars Attacks! are creatures that can be traced back to 50s and 60s pulp-magazine covers and illustrations as much as to movies of the same period.
In short, apart from the four black characters–all of them admired for their resourcefulness and determination–the only other human figures who aren’t viewed as geeks and washouts (even when they’re viewed with some affection, as is Tom Jones) are a couple of preteen kids (who meet cute at the end of the picture) and an old woman who barely knows what’s going on: a half dozen outsiders who wind up as virtually the only survivors of the martian invasion. This isn’t to say that these characters are viewed without irony. Taffy is seen at one point reading Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha, and in his final hero’s speech Richie suggests that maybe mankind would be better off living in tepees–two indications that they’re really just a couple of hippies. But implicitly at least they and the grandmother and the black family (and Tom Jones, out of courtesy) deserve to survive. Just about everyone else is wiped out–and not at all missed.
