Warner Bros. | 1996 | 116 mins. | PG-13
I’ve been intrigued by everything Tim Burton has done throughout his career and enjoyed most of his films. Needless to say, I was very curious when I heard Burton had agreed to direct Mars Attacks!, a film based on that subversive set of trading cards. I knew film fans would experience something different if they were willing to give it a try. The trading cards graphically depicted a Martian invasion of Earth with lots of gory detail. While the film maintains some of the gratuitous violence, Burton presents the story in a decidedly tongue-in-cheek fashion. Mars Attacks! tends to be a film people either love or hate.
The movie opens with a stampeding herd of burning cattle, incinerated by a small Martian scouting team. The Earth has proven to be a suitable playground and the Martians send out a mighty armada of spaceships for invasion. Meanwhile, the President of the United States and his staff prepare a welcome committee for the arriving spaceships in the Nevada desert, not knowing if the aliens come in peace. Everything looks fine at first, when the Martians announce that they come in peace. Soon enough, it becomes clear that they’ve come to create havoc. They disintegrate the welcome party, leaving behind only their colored bones. From there onward, the Martians start destroying everything in their path.
Tim Burton’s ingenious film is a satiric riot. Every character is over the top; clearly meant to be unbelievable. A doofus president (Jack Nicholson), unworldly military advisors (Rod Steiger), competing sensation-seeking reporters (Michael J. Fox and Sarah Jessica Parker), scientists (Pierce Brosnan), obnoxious gamblers (Danny DeVito), an undersexed press advisor (Martin Short), rednecks, heroic kids, and weird experiments on aliens – only this time we are the aliens.
Despite the all-star cast, Burton and screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski aren’t particularly concerned with character development. It’s not really necessary, as many of the characters are introduced and killed within minutes. Personally, I enjoyed seeing some of my favorite actors taken out quickly, and in unique ways.
The film is accurately framed at 2.40:1 and presented in 1080p with the VC-1 codec. Black levels are a bit limited, most noticeable during film’s title sequence, though no other scenes ever look quite so drained of contrast. The image also shows noticeable signs of digital manipulation – wide shots tend to look a touch hazy and indistinct, high contrast scenes exhibit noticeable edge haloing and the grain pattern appears a bit too smooth and clean. Colors are sufficiently deep and saturated.
The 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio mix is dominated by the front sound stage, with slight support from the rear surround channels for the occasional ambient and directional effect. LFE shows up mostly in the final act’s action scenes, but the track overall has good depth in the lower ranges and detail in the upper. Though the mix is not particularly interesting – sounding pretty conventional most of the time – the lossless presentation gets the job done with no significant issues; though it’s not reference quality.
This blu-ray has no special features.
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