The best alien invasion movie of 1996 isn’t the one with Will Smith
Watch This offers movie recommendations inspired by new releases, premieres, current events, or occasionally just our own inscrutable whims. This week: With A Quiet Place Part II postponed, check out these earlier movies about hostile alien invaders, all available to rent digitally or stream from home.
Mars Attacks! (1996)
The year was 1996, and movie theaters barely had enough time to recover from the first assault from beyond the stars before the next fleet of spaceships hovered in over the horizon. Independence Day arrived first, heralded by a Super Bowl trailer that blew up the White House—a mere preview of what it would do to its fellow summer blockbusters at the box office. But Mars Attacks! had actually been around longer, languishing in development hell since Alex Cox first took a crack at adapting the infamously gory Topps trading card series in the mid-’80s. When Tim Burton and Jonathan Gems rescued the property a decade later, they put its throwback flying saucers on a collision course with Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin’s sky-swallowing City Destroyers—prompting a skittish Warner Bros. to eventually move Mars Attacks! to the fittingly cheeky, Christmastime release date of Friday, December 13.
Both films are hybrids of vintage genre fare: drive-in-ready alien-invasion spectaculars crossed with the star-studded Irwin Allen disaster films of the ’70s. Both aim their lasers at some of Earth’s most recognizable and cherished landmarks. And both make room for rousing, highlight-reel speeches from an American president. But only Mars Attacks! punctuates that address with a lethal punchline from an interstellar gag gift. And while that wasn’t much help with ticket sales in 1996, it makes all the difference now: Mars Attacks! is the more enjoyable watch today, especially when viewed as the hour-and-a-half-long raspberry blown at the end of Tim Burton’s first act as a director.
Go looking for Burton’s visual signatures in Mars Attacks!, and you’ll mostly come up with a pile of iridescent bones. The look of the film stems from the trading cards, the story of which Burton and Gems loosely adapt into a transcontinental sci-fi farce in which marquee names like Jack Nicholson and Glenn Close haplessly swat at Martians who attack first in response to a cultural misunderstanding, before deploying wave after wave of saucers, mechs, and ground troops seemingly just for the hell of it. A prevailing shits-and-giggles spirit buoys Mars Attacks! whenever it threatens to sink under its destructive din. Where else are you going to see Nicholson deliver an exaggerated portrait of diplomatic dignity and the “Jack is back” chaos of a craven Las Vegas casino owner in the same movie?
