Horror

I Think This Is Tim Burton’s Most Underrated Movie

Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks! wasn’t a big hit, but it’s severely underrated sci-fi comedy.

Image courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures.

Tim Burton is the man behind several childhood classics for me, but his 1996 underperformer Mars Attacks! deserves far more recognition. Like many of my generation, I essentially have Tim Burton to thank for introducing me to the Dark Knight with 1989’s Batman and 1992’s Batman Returns, while Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, Beetlejuice, Sleepy Hollow, and Beetlejuice Beetlejuice each hold places of honor in my album of Burton’s greatest hits. Yet even among Tim Burton’s best work, Mars Attacks! is a true wild card.

Videos by ComicBook.com

Released on December 13, 1996 and based on the eponymous trading card series, Mars Attacks! delivered exactly what its title advertised, but to little box office fortune and mixed reception. However, Burton’s wacky little alien invasion opus that is Mars Attacks! is by far his most underappreciated work.

Mars Attacks! Is Scarier (& More Violent) Than You Remember

marsattacks.jpg

Tim Burton is never one to shy away from taking a PG-13 rating for everything he can get out of it (to say nothing of Burton really going to town with the R-rated Sleepy Hollow). However, despite presenting itself as a silly, farcical alien invasion romp, Mars Attacks! is shockingly blunt in how scary it makes the invading Martians. With their oversized brains, skeletal faces, completely exposed eyeballs, and dialect consisting entirely of “Ack-ack!” the Martians of Mars Attacks! are as over-the-top a caricature of aliens as one can get, but the movie’s real punch is how ruthless these bizarre alien visitors really are.

I can still vividly remember seeing Mars Attacks! as a kid and being shocked and horrified at General Casey (Paul Winfield) being zapped into a neon-red skeleton by the Martian ambassador’s ray gun. From that point on, Mars Attacks! is absolutely a take-no-prisoners affair of humans being disintegrated into multi-colored skeletons left and right by Martians who think of them as insects.

In fact, to that very point, Rod Steiger’s belligerent General Decker dies one of the most undignified deaths I’ve ever seen a movie character meet, being shrunk to the size of a bug and squashed under the boot of the Martian ambassador. However tongue-in-cheek its tone might be, Mars Attacks! presents the the Martians as a real and terrifying threat, and in a much darker tale compared to 1996’s other big alien invasion movie Independence Day. While the human population of Independence Day bands together in an epic and uplifting showdown with their alien adversaries, Mars Attacks! shows mankind mostly panicking and getting collectively trounced until the most absurd Martian weakness imaginable — that being the sound of Slim Whitman’s “Indian Love Call” — is accidentally stumbled upon.

Mars Attacks! Has a Huge Ensemble Cast (& Kills Off Most of Them)

As a direct parallel to Independence Day, Tim Burton assembles a huge ensemble cast of big (and in some cases future) stars in Mars Attacks! — including but not limited to Jack Nicholson, Glenn Close, Pierce Brosnan, Sarah Jessica Parker, Michael J. Fox, Tom Jones, Martin Short, Danny DeVito, Jack Black, Natalie Portman, and many others. However, in Burton’s movie, they’re mostly lambs to the slaughter with the invading Martians, and often in ways that are as darkly hilarious as they are brutal.

You can imagine how a kid like me who mainly knew Michael J. Fox from Back to the Future reacted to seeing Marty McFly reduced to a smoldering green skeleton. Danny De Vito and Jack Black meet similar fates, while Martin Short has his finger viciously bitten off by Lisa Marie’s disguised Martian before being clobbered over the head into ambiguous death. Jack Nicholson’s President James Dale also meets a grim end after his plea for peace between Earth and Mars, but even some surviving characters meet twisted and disturbing fates.

Pierce Brosnan, a year removed from his 007 debut in Goldeneye in his role of Professor Donald Kessler, is reduced to a severed head kept alive with alien electrodes, with the head of Sarah Jessica Parker’s Nathalie Lake transplanted onto her pet Chihuahua’s body. While the two eventually confess their love to each other in their shared death scene, Mars Attacks! left this youngster disturbed and perversely amazed by the freak show of death and dismemberment Burton had concocted. It wasn’t until years later that I realized that Burton had endeavored to pull off Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho gimmick to a far greater degree in Mars Attacks! — bring big stars into the story as likable characters, and pull the rug out from under the audience by decimating ninety percent of the movie’s ensemble. Job well done, Burton!

Mars Attacks! Is Ed Wood for the ’90s

On the surface, Mars Attacks! is memorable on pure shock value alone, but knowledge of alien movie history is necessary to fully appreciate what Burton was going for with it. More specifically, Burton’s long-standing appreciation for the work of B-movie schlock king Ed Wood. Burton has frequently cited the much lambasted Wood as an influence, with Burton’s last movie before Mars Attacks! being his 1994 Ed Wood biopic. With a firmer understanding of history, I eventually came to fully appreciate that Burton made a contemporary Ed Wood movie in Mars Attacks!

Wood’s masterpiece of low-budget, crummy effects and clumsy filmmaking in Plan 9 From Outer Space is often cited as among the worst movies ever made, yet Burton brings the same tone and distinctly ’50s feel to Mars Attacks! Burton’s flying saucers are CGI rather than paper plates, but the Martians and the world of Mars Attacks! are right out of an Ed Wood movie, right down to the U.S. Army’s clearly ’50s-era military uniforms. It might seem a little on the simplistic side to summarize Mars Attacks! as an Ed Wood movie with actual money behind it, but Burton’s wacky, whimsical sci-fi black comedy exudes the DNA of Ed Wood from start to finish.

Tim Burton is often boiled down to being Hollywood’s premiere goth filmmaker, a storyteller whose sensibilities align with the dark tales of Batman, Betelgeuse, Wednesday Addams, and Jack Skellington like few others do. However, Burton seldom gets the credit he should as a director adept at really taking audiences by surprise, a skill he flexes to tremendous effect in Mars Attacks! As a child, Burton’s decision to lay such indifferent waste to his own ensemble cast and much of humanity in Mars Attacks! took me aback like few movies had. In hindsight, I can confidently call Mars Attacks! easily Tim Burton’s most underrated movie, a Psycho-style parlor trick of keeping the audience on their toes for which big A-lister will unexpectedly die next wrapped in the B-movie fun of an Ed Wood film.