MARS ATTACKS!
****
Directed by Tim Burton.
Starring Jack Nicholson, Pierce Brosnan, Glenn Close, Sarah Jessica Parker, Annette Bening, Danny DeVito, Rod Steiger, Martin Short, Michael J. Fox, Lisa Marie, Paul Winfied.
Sci-Fi/Comedy, USA/UK, 106 mins, Cert 12.
UK release - Limited Edition Steelbook, Collector’s Edition & Standard 4K UHD via Warner Bros. on 31st August 2026.
Based on trading cards, MARS ATTACKS! was something of a flop when it was released in 1996, barely scraping back its $100 million budget and receiving bemused reactions from audiences and critics alike. INDEPENDENCE DAY came out the same year and was a huge success so it wasn’t the alien invasion idea that put audiences off, but in a weird echo of 1982 - when John Carpenter put out THE THING not long after Steven Spielberg’s E.T.: THE EXTRA TERRESTRIAL went stratospheric - the admittedly less commercial version of the genre just didn’t hit.
But time does strange things and, just like with THE THING, MARS ATTACKS! has been reappraised several times over the years and now it has reached its 30th anniversary Warner Bros. have given it a 4K UHD treatment makeover, and if any movie from the mid-1990s is deserving of such a process then this is it as MARS ATTACKS! in 4K is one delicious looking piece of big-budget silliness.
It helps that director Tim Burton ‘gets it’, as the filmmaker is essentially ‘one of us’ and knows what made those cheap n’ cheerful sci-fi B-movies of the 1950s so attractive to young viewers of the time who would go on to make movies of their own. However, this being 1996 and movies such as JURASSIC PARK (ironically, Burton was going to make DINOSAURS ATTACK! but decided to go with the alien invasion option as Spielberg was making THE LOST WORLD: JURASSIC PARK at the time) and TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY having upped the game for special effects then Burton would need to look beyond stop-motion puppetry to achieve the Martian effects.
And he did, as MARS ATTACKS! is a fantastic blend of practical, optical and CGI effects that are a set of 3D glasses short of popping right off your screen, as the cartoonish Martians with their big brains and laser guns come to Earth and attack everything they see, starting with the US army (of course). In this world, the US is led by President Dale (Jack Nicholson), who tries to negotiate with the aliens with help from leading scientist Donald Kessler (Pierce Brosnan) and his two Generals, those being the bloodthirsty General Decker (Rod Steiger) - who wants to go nuclear on the Martians - and the cowardly General Casey (Paul Winfield), who is sent out to be the first human to greet them.
From then on in it is carnage with very little plot, but it doesn’t need one as it is the colourful visuals and the ensemble cast sending themselves up in an over-exaggerated B-movie style that make it so much fun. Yes, for a movie with very little plot it does run at least 15 minutes too long, but Warner Bros. wanted their money’s worth so Tim Burton was going to make it last as long as possible before fatigue set in, which he just about gets away with.
Coming backed with a couple of new retrospectives, where crew members from the time share some of their memories, such as nobody being interested in appearing in it until Jack Nicholson had signed on and then everyone wanted to be involved (which they pretty much are), and boasting a gorgeous 4K UHD image that shows up the green screen work every once in a while (but that just adds to the B-movie nature of it so it isn’t a negative), MARS ATTACKS! is an absolute hoot if you approach it in the right spirit. That is to say, just because it is full of ‘serious’ A-list actors like Jack Nicholson, Pierce Brosnan and Glenn Close, don’t go expecting award-winning performances and a thought-provoking story because this is not that movie. Instead, this is Hollywood having a laugh - albeit an expensive one - and although the timing may have been wrong in 1996 to fully appreciate it, in production-line-movie-making 2026 Tim Burton’s sense of wackiness and abandonment is very refreshing. Shame it takes a 30-year-old movie getting re-released to remind us of this.
Chris Ward