by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was Tim Burton’s
1996 science-fiction epic Mars Attacks!, which began life as one of the weirdest story sources imaginable for a
major-studio, big-budget, major-star film: a series of bubble-gum cards. In
1962, for some reason, the Topps bubble-gum company decided to take a breather
from their usual business of sticking athletes’ pictures in with packages of
their bubble gum and instead plot out a 54-panel serial called Mars Attacks!, which would tell a continuous story of a Martian
invasion of Earth. The series became a brief fad among some of my fellow
grade-schoolers in the day and then was virtually forgotten by just about
everyone, including the executives at the Topps company (who gave up on the
serial-story concept and went back to baseball and football players), except
film director Tim Burton, who’d already had some unlikely successes (including Beetlejuice — his clever inversion of the Ghostbusters formula in which it was ghosts trying to get rid
of humans instead of the other way around — and the first two films in the
modern Batman cycle at a time when
superhero movies were actually considered a risk instead of a staple of the big
summer blockbuster market) and so he got the green light from Warner Bros. to
make a movie out of 54 bubble-gum cards. The original series writers,
uncredited on the film itself, were Len Brown, Woody Gelman, Wally Wood, Bob
Powell and Norm Saunders; Burton tabbed a writer with the intriguing name
Jonathan Gems to turn the basic concept into a script. I have only dim memories
of the card series so I don’t know how faithful, overall, the movie is to it,
but I do remember that the 54th
card in the series was headlined “Mars Destroyed!” and featured the Red Planet
blowing up as the result of a successful Earth counter-attack — alas, the movie
did not end that way!
The film has
at least three separate plot lines in three widely separated locales —
Washington, D.C., Las Vegas and a tiny town in Kansas whose only discernible
business is a doughnut shop identified with a giant replica doughnut with the
letters “DONUT” emblazoned on it, just in case any of the few passers-by didn’t
get the point. The people who run it, and apparently everybody else in town,
lives in trailers — though there’s a nursing home nearby which features prominently
in the plot — and the main characters in this part of the movie are the
Norrises: grandma Florence Norris (Sylvia Sidney, still playing quiet and
dignified even at that age), mother Sue Ann (O-Lan Jones), a father who isn’t
given a first name (Joe Don Baker) and their two kids, older brother Billy
Glenn (Jack Black) — a military enlistee of whom his folks are proud — and
younger brother Richie (Lukas Haas; it’s nice to be reminded of how cute this
guy once was, and he plays the sort of withdrawn character that a decade later
would have gone to Paul Dano), whom the family detests because he’s grown his
hair long, he isn’t interested in joining the military and he’d rather hang out
with his grandma at the nursing home than be with the rest of the clan. The
Washington, D.C. scenes are dominated by U.S. President James Dale (Jack
Nicholson), his wife Marsha (Glenn Close), White House press secretary Jerry
Ross (Martin Short), rival generals Decker (Rod Steiger) and Casey (Paul
Winfield), as well as a scientist, Donald Kessler (Pierce Brosnan), brought in
to advise the government on what to do about the Martian threat. (When Pierce
Brosnan entered after having starred in some of the James Bond series entries,
I couldn’t help but joke that he’d introduce himself as “Kessler … Donald Kessler.”) He ends up becoming a severed head
inside one of the Martian spaceships, along with Nathalie Lake (Sarah Jessica
Parker), the TV host who was interviewing him for the Today show and flirting with him — much to the disgust
of her husband, the show’s director — and there’s a good scene at the end in
which they try to make love with each other even though they’re only
disembodied heads. (Earlier Lake’s head ended up on the body of her Chihuahua
dog, and vice versa.)
The Vegas scenes center around Art Land (Jack Nicholson —
he played two parts but could do so easily since the two characters never
meet), who’s about to open a new casino/resort/hotel called the Galaxy and has
summoned investors (though it already seems to be completed and one wonders why
he needs additional money) and his
stereotypically dumb wife Barbara (Annette Bening, once again cast in a part
for which she was way
overqualified). The hotel is sufficiently finished that there’s already a show
going on in its showroom featuring singer Tom Jones, cast as himself — when the
camera panned to his three backup singers I couldn’t help but joke, “Ah, 40
Feet from a Mediocre Has-Been.” There’s also another major character in the Vegas scenes, burned-out
ex-boxer Byron Williams (played by burned-out ex-football player Jim Brown),
who works as a bouncer at an Egyptian-themed casino (and has to wear full King
Tut drag) and also doubles as some sort of entertainer putting on athletic
exhibitions, though we never see him do this. He’s anxious to get back to
Washington, D.C. to ride out the crisis with his estranged wife Louise (Pam
Grier) and their rambunctious, uncontrollable sons Cedric (Ray J) and Neville
(Brandon Hammond). In a scene that relates to absolutely nothing else in the
film but is one of the best things in it, Louise, who works as a bus driver,
spots her sons in a video arcade (playing, what else, a shoot-’em-up game in
which their fictional adversary is a Martian) instead of school, announces to
the passengers that they’re going to make an unscheduled stop, and then stops
the bus, invades the arcade, pulls her kids out of it and chews them out to the
cheers of the bus’s passengers. (Pam Grier, still kickin’ ass!)
The Martians
themselves are a cross between the “little green men” of classic sci-fi pulp
art and the Talosians from the pilot of the original Star Trek: scrawny beings with oversized crania and green
jelly instead of blood. They attack with ray guns against which, of course,
Earth’s weapons offer no defense, and when they shoot a person the victim’s
entire skin and muscles vaporize immediately and all that’s left is a skeleton
— both Charles and I wondered if someone like Tim Burton, who so loves the
worst 1950’s schlock sci-fi he actually made a biopic of Edward D. Wood, Jr.,
had copied this effect from Tom Graeff’s Teenagers from Outer Space, though Burton’s effects budget was several orders
of magnitude bigger than Graeff’s and his version of the effect is both more
convincing and more gross. The main plot point of Mars Attacks! is an interesting inversion of 1950’s sci-fi
movies like The Day the Earth Stood Still (from which Burton pretty obviously copied the flying-saucer “look” of
the Martian spacecraft) in which everyone in the government, from the President
on down — except for General Decker — insists that the Martians’ intentions in
visiting Earth are peaceful. Even when they shoot their ray guns at the dove of
peace released at the point of first contact by a young man in Las Vegas, and
then shoot the people there to meet them (under a big sign reading “WELCOME TO
EARTH”), President Dale and his advisors insist that these are merely
“misunderstandings” and they’re going to keep trying to talk to the Martians
instead of attack them.
Mars Attacks! is the sort of weird movie that doesn’t quite come off — the effective fusion of camp and action
Burton achieved in his two Batman movies eludes him here, and in trying to make his action scenes both
exciting and cartoony he all too frequently achieves neither. It nominally
takes place in the year 2000 — obviously picked for its symbolic millennial
significance — but there are some deliberate throwbacks to the early 1960’s,
when the basic story source originated, notably the universal translator that’s
supposed to render the Martians’ duck-like language into English (and which
keeps saying the Martians are saying, “We come in peace,” and “We are your
friends,” even while they’re vaporizing every human in sight with those damned
ray guns which look like plastic
toys on screen), whose memory seems to consist of four little spools of
magnetic tape. (Missing the parodistic intent, Charles wondered, “Who still
uses tape as a storage medium?”)
Inevitably, Mars Attacks! is a film of moments rather than a coherent whole, and equally
inevitably it’s filled with references to other movies — including a sequence
at the White House war room that can’t help but evoke Dr. Strangelove even though its propagandistic purpose is quite
the opposite: the general who’s advocating an all-out nuclear attack on the
Martians is clearly being presented as the sensible one, while the President
himself and the advisors (including Winfield’s General Casey, who’s quite
obviously drawn as a parody of Colin Powell) keep trying to “negotiate” with
extraterrestrial beings clearly bent on nothing but our total destruction —
though there’s a worm-turning sequence later in which General Ripper, oops, I
mean Decker wins approval to nuke the Martian ship — only the Martians have an
anti-missile defense system, a giant red balloon that swallows the
nuclear-armed missile, digests it and lets what’s left of its energy out with a
burp as it returns to its home craft.
In the end only seven of the 22 credited
principals are still alive, and the only thing that saves Earth from the
Martian invaders is Burton’s and Gems’ weird analogue for the earth bacteria
and viruses that destroyed the Martians in the obvious model for their story,
H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds. As he’s rescuing his grandma from the nursing home which is being
attacked by the Martians, Richie accidentally pulls out the jack from grandma’s
headphones — thereby playing the record she was listening to, an insane cover
of the Jeanette MacDonald-Nelson Eddy hit “Indian Love Call” by, of all people,
Slim Whitman — and the sound of Whitman’s voice is precisely the vibration
needed to blow up the Martians’ oversized heads and get the green jelly they
have in place of blood to spurt out picturesquely. Accordingly Richie and his
grandmother win the Medal of Honor (though one wonders just who awarded it to them since both the President and
Congress were vaporized in earlier scenes) and the film draws to an end that’s
about as quirky as the rest of it. Mars Attacks! is Tim Burton’s imagination running wild — it’s
O.K. entertainment but he’s made many movies that worked better because he kept
his rambunctious imagination more under control — but it has one rather odd
saving grace: Jack Nicholson’s performance as the President. As the hotel
promoter in Vegas he’s turning in typical Nicholson schtick and makes himself even more unwatchable than
Burton intended, but as the President he clearly modeled his performance on
Richard Nixon and turned in a good enough job that I came away convinced he
would have been a better choice than Anthony Hopkins or Frank Langella in the
two “serious” movies so far made about Nixon. I’ve never been a Nicholson fan —
that shark’s-teeth grin and vulpine laugh always put me off — but he’s one
actor Tim Burton seems to have got the best out of; his performance as the
Joker in the first Burton Batman seems to me the best work he’s ever done — the mannerisms that put me
off when Nicholson plays “serious” roles were just right as the comic villain
(Cesar Romero in the TV show overemphasized the camp; the late Heath Ledger in The
Dark Knight Returns made him too crazy; Nicholson got the balance just right) — and
once again here he got finely honed acting out of a performer who usually just
explodes — or throws up — on screen.
