Mars Attacks - The best movie ever to be spawned by bubblegum cards!

 The trouble is... ‘Mars Attacks’ doesn’t have a lot (if any!) competition for that title.  In the mid nineties, when alien invasion fever was at its highest, someone proposed a film about cheesy 1950s-style Martians attacking Earth and ‘Mars Attacks’ was born.

The first thing you need to know about it is that it’s an ‘ensemble’ piece, i.e. it has simply tonnes of A-list stars attached to the project.  And, despite sounding impressive, that’s kind of a downside.  For none of them are really given enough screen time to get to know.  There’s absolutely no character development for any of them and, what’s more, most of them are pretty objectionable anyway, leaving you cold when they finally get melted in a – visually-pleasing – array of colourful laser fire from out green, big-brained invaders.  There are a couple of ‘nicer’ characters, but they’re hardly in it enough for you to even remember their names.  Many of the characters could have been removed completely and the story wouldn’t have lost anything.

Jack Nicholson is undoubtedly the ‘main’ character, as he plays the President of America.  However, despite his acting abilities, he doesn’t really do much as the role.  Perhaps that’s why they gave him another role to play, but, as I said before, half the characters could have been easily gotten away with and Jack’s second performance is one of these.

As for the story... well, there isn’t really one.  Mars does indeed attack, but not until about forty-five minutes into the movie.  What you have is basically a ‘sketch show’ with many famous faces, all vying to ‘out-horrible’ each other.

However, despite the film’s many flaws, it’s kind of worth a watch... but only for the Martians.  They’re completely the stars of the film.  They get all the best lines (not that any are actually spoken in English) and are a delight to watch.  In fact, they’re so good they only go and double how bad their human (and un-computer-generated) co-stars are in comparison.

If you think you can sit through a sketch-type alien invasion film with a few comedic moments (but not enough to really class the film as an out and out ‘comedy’) you should enjoy this.  Even if it’s just to watch Tom Jones thrash it out with an alien race (not that IS unusual!).

7/10 if I woke up on Groundhog Day and had to watch this again, I could live with that