Mars Attacks! opened in U.S. theaters on December 13, 1996, carrying a tagline that gave away the whole joke: “Nice planet. We’ll take it!” Tim Burton directed. Jonathan Gems wrote the screenplay, working from the Topps trading card series of the same name. Warner Bros. Pictures released it, with a production budget that came to $80 million and another $20 million spent on the marketing campaign. The film arrived to mixed reviews, and its reputation has not settled much since.
Trailer, via Warner Bros. Rewind.
A Dove in Pahrump, Nevada
The setup is pure pulp. A Martian spaceship gathers hundreds of other ships and travels to Earth. President James Dale addresses the nation about the historic event. Days later, his science aides arrange a first-contact meeting in Pahrump, Nevada, while Dale watches on television with his wife Marsha and his daughter Taffy.
The Martian ambassador speaks through a translation machine and announces his race has “come in peace.” A hippie releases a live dove as a symbol of peace. The ambassador shoots it, then orders his Martians to massacre most of the attendees — General Casey, reporter Jason Stone, and young private Billy-Glenn Norris among them. Talk-show host Natalie Lake and her chihuahua, Poppy, are captured.
“come in peace”
That is the film’s central gag and its central problem. The dove is a peace symbol; the Martians read it as a declaration of war. Dale decides the misunderstanding can be fixed and sends Professor Donald Kessler to renegotiate. The ambassador then requests to address Congress, and at that meeting the Martians annihilate most of Congress. Kessler is knocked unconscious and taken aboard the ship, where his head is later disembodied and animated as part of their experiments. Natalie and Poppy get their heads switched onto each other’s bodies.
Jack Nicholson Plays Two Roles
Burton cast Jack Nicholson as both President Dale and Art Land. The decision to build an A-list ensemble here follows the strategy Irwin Allen used for The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno, and the roster is genuinely deep: Glenn Close as Marsha Dale, Annette Bening as Barbara Land, Pierce Brosnan as Donald Kessler, Danny DeVito as a rude gambler, Martin Short as Jerry Ross, Sarah Jessica Parker as Nathalie Lake, Michael J. Fox as Jason Stone, Rod Steiger as General Decker, Tom Jones as himself, Lukas Haas as Richie Norris, and Natalie Portman as Taffy Dale. Sylvia Sidney appears in her final film role.
The casting history is more interesting than some of what made it to screen. Susan Sarandon was originally set for Barbara Land before Bening took it. Hugh Grant was the first choice for Kessler. Nicholson, approached for the President, joked that he wanted to play all the roles.
Industrial Light & Magic Builds the Martians
The filmmakers hired Industrial Light & Magic to create the Martians using computer animation. Their earlier plan — stop motion supervised by Barry Purves — fell through because of budget and time limits. Filming ran from February to June 1996 across California, Nevada, Kansas, Arizona, and Argentina.
General Decker Wants Nuclear Retaliation
General Decker fails to persuade Dale to retaliate with nuclear weapons. After a failed attempt to assassinate Dale using a disguised Martian, the Martians declare war and invade in droves, starting with Washington, D.C., and spreading around the globe.
This is where Mars Attacks! should tighten. It does not. The film has a large cast and kills most of it, which is a real comic engine, but the deaths land as noise rather than consequence. Michael J. Fox’s Jason Stone is gone early. Rod Steiger’s General Decker spends his scenes demanding nuclear retaliation and getting refused. The movie keeps promising a war and then cuts away to another room full of famous people waiting to be vaporized.
A Comedy That Will Not Commit
The tone is the fight. Mars Attacks! wants the disaster-film scale of The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno and also wants to mock it. The Topps cards it came from were lurid, mean little things, and the movie keeps reaching for that meanness — the dove, the Congress, the head-swapping — then pulling back into something more comfortable.
Alex Cox had tried to make a Mars Attacks film in the 1980s before Burton and Gems began development in 1993. Gems turned in his first draft in 1994. Warner Bros. then commissioned rewrites from Gems, Burton, and Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski to try to bring the budget down to $60 million. The final production budget came to $80 million.
Those two figures are the whole of what is known about the money. A target of $60 million and a final cost of $80 million. Whatever the rewrites were meant to do, the film did not come in under the number the studio set.
Frank Welker voices the Martians. That is a small credit on a long list, and it is one of the few jobs on this production that did exactly what it was hired to do.
What Actually Holds Up
The Martians themselves. The computer animation gives them a rubbery, gleeful cruelty that the human cast cannot match, and the design is the one element that never feels like a compromise. When the ambassador shoots the dove, the movie is briefly exactly what it should be: nasty, fast, and funny.
Jack Nicholson is the other argument for the film. Playing both the President and Art Land lets him work two registers, and the dual role is the closest Mars Attacks! comes to a real satirical idea — the powerful and the huckster as the same face. It is not developed. It is there.
The rest is a long, expensive shrug. The invasion spreads around the globe and the movie never finds a way to make that scale mean anything. The head-swapping experiments are a gag, not a payoff. Kessler’s disembodied head is a gag, not a payoff. The film stacks up provocations and then declines to answer for any of them.
The 5.7 Score
Mars Attacks! drew mixed reviews from critics, with praise for its comedic satire. The published critical score sits at 5.7/10, and Rotten Tomatoes lists it at 57%. Those numbers describe a film that split its audience and never fully recovered the split.
The parts worth keeping are real. The computer-animated Martians, Nicholson’s double turn, the dove, the Congress. Everything around them is a studio trying to buy a tone it did not trust. Burton has made worse films. He has rarely made one this unsure of itself.
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