Superstar Jack Nicholson as the President of the United States greeting invaders from outer space? Anything can and does happen when the twisted mind of director Tim Burton plunges planet Earth into complete pandemonium in this all-star sci-fi spoof. Based upon Mars Attacks! Provider Warner Bros. Entertainment Rating PG-13 Release date 1997 Running time 1:45:43 Audio Czech English French (France) German Hungarian Italian Polish Portuguese (Brazil) Russian Spanish Spanish (Latin America) Thai Subtitle Chinese (Traditional) Czech Danish Dutch English [CC] Estonian Finnish French (France) German [CC] Greek Hungarian Icelandic Indonesian Italian Japanese Latvian Lithuanian Malay Norwegian Polish Portuguese (Brazil) Portuguese (Portugal) Russian Slovenian Spanish Spanish (Latin America) Swedish Thai Turkish
Source: Mars Attacks!
About the Movie
Flying saucers from Mars surround Earth, and humanity rolls out its best welcome: Congress, the military, the media, and a President (Jack Nicholson) determined to make peace. The Martians — big-brained, grinning skeletons in glass helmets — land in the Nevada desert, announce “We come in peace,” and promptly incinerate the welcoming committee. A second summit ends the same way. It was, their translator eventually reveals, a misunderstanding. It was not.
As Martian troops rampage through a lovingly ridiculous all-star America — vaporizing landmarks, experimenting on teenagers, toppling into every disaster-movie cliché at once — the war effort dissolves into chaos until a dim teenager and his grandmother stumble onto the Martians’ fatal weakness: a particular yodeling country record that makes their enormous brains explode.
Why This Movie Matters to Sci-Fi
Mars Attacks! is Tim Burton’s affectionate parody of 1950s invasion films, based — improbably — on a 1962 trading-card series famous for its gore. Released the same year as Independence Day, it flopped against that film’s earnest spectacle and has since become the cult answer to it: where ID4 plays the invasion straight, Burton plays it as farce, with one of the most stacked casts ever assembled (Nicholson twice, Glenn Close, Annette Bening, Pierce Brosnan, Danny DeVito, and a young Natalie Portman). It stands as the genre’s reminder that the end of the world can also be a joke — and that the B-movies of the fifties deserved a tribute as gleefully unhinged as they were.
