Mars Attacks! (1996)

Take every aliens-are-coming!-themed movie since the dawn of time, add cotton candy and gin, mix, pour, and you'll probably get Tim Burton's Mars Attacks! Here is pure, gooey, science-fiction campiness -- cartoonish alien-invasion buffoonery in puppetry and live action. The bubble-helmeted, bug-eyed, skull-faced brainiacs that travel in dreamily hovering saucers from Mars to a disastrous mano-a-mano first-contact with the U.S. president (Jack Nicholson) make their genocidal intentions known in as broad a caricature of such a travesty as grim humor could allow. I give due credit to Pierce Brosnan for showing the dual-dangling pluckiness to appear in this production as the bemused pipe-smoking academic who (at the aliens' behest) trades heads with Sarah Jessica Parker and her chihuahua. (The next time he would show such besotted courage -- or wackiness -- he took a singing part in Mamma Mia!) The aliens' leering visages and creepy floating locomotion -- not to mention their ack! ack! ack-ack! chatter -- are so funny that they scream "You cannot be taking us seriously!" even as they scheme to rape Earth and pillage its population -- or perhaps it's the other way around? Finally, just so we know that Tim Burton is from the shallow end of Quentin Tarantino's gene pool, Earth's ultimate victory over the aliens comes straight out of Attack of the Killer Tomatoes. A must-see movie but (to me) less impressive on repeat viewings. 3.5 stars. (5-7-09)