Pierce Brosnan Movie:

		List Price: $9.98		Label: Warner Home Video Salesrank: 23154 Released: October 28, 2008
		Our Price: $4.75
		Used Price: $4.99
		MPAA Rating: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested) Media: DVD

Editorial Review:
Studio: Warner Home Video Release Date: 10/28/2008 Rating: Pg13

Mars Attacks! Reviews:
Campy, but Essential for any respectable American cult film collection...Blu-ray please!
2009-11-13 - This title could excel in Blu-ray. With a good remastering, CGI clean-up, Dolby/THX, some good extras & special features, and maybe a documentary about the satire/commentary on society etc, and/or the historical & surreal inspirations for the narrative and visual styling. The box art is also nice minus the actor photos. Not perfect but what good cult film is.

It's all in good fun
2009-09-23 - I can't help but find this entertaining. Mars Attacks! is a silly satire on all those sci-fi films that were made back in the 50's and 60's. There are literally tons of references that it's probably best not to keep track, cause you'll lose count. This may not be Burton's best, but it's certainly his funniest since Beetlejuice. There are some hysterical moments, mostly involving scientists, government officials, and rednecks. The only problem I had with this film was that the cast was too big: some characters were very useless and not very developed, and are killed off too soon. But other than that, I found this to be a very amusing sci-fi parody. I especially like Nicholson, Benning, and Brown for their memorable performances. So if you're into some satire and some sci-fi silliness, then you'll probably enjoy Mars Attacks! from the opening credits to the end credits.

MARTIAN TO A DIFFERENT BEAT
2009-09-08 - What impressed me, in a way, was the overall TOTALLY MEDIOCRE acting done by this bunch of real pros. Then I got to thinking. They were probably doing that on purpose to mirror 50s versions of with actors of similar subject matter. (So bad it is good, theory) The main exception to this "bad acting" is Jack Nicholson's final Presidential rant. It is over the top. But the acting is not a problem with me as the Martians and other special effects are the STARS. They are unbelievably cool and seamless in integration. They are what I waited eagerly to see and what had my total attention. The Martian language of gutteral spurts is so funny, their mannerisms, their unreasonable cruelty. The one Martian disguised as a bombshell blonde--such great work by the designers. It is also a shot of hilarity that while in J-Men Forever, Rock and Roll blasted from the moon is supposed to kill Earthlings, in this movie "The Indian Love Call" and other 30s Era music is the death potion for the Martians, whose brains explode in intolerance. Sylvia Sidney is great in this--she is in practically everything she does. Although it was released in 96 it seems that it came out only yesterday, and many of the cast members are now gone or their health is compromised. Many of them had been in earlier Sci-Fi flicks and it was a sort of Sci-Fi mini reunion. The Martians and the special effects get five stars from this ol' girl.

Silly Fun
2009-07-26 - This movie is a lot of fun. It's clearly not serious, and if you look at it as just a good way to spend a couple of hours watching famous actors get zapped (with two such performances by Jack Nicholson), you'll enjoy it. It's a parody of a lot of different things, including the alien invasion genre, War of the Worlds, and those big budget Hollywood disaster films that Irwin Allen used to make.

The really nice touch is that I could just see our leaders and scientists acting like this if actual aliens showed up. Thank heavens for Grandma!

I want to thank my grandma for always being so good to me, and, and for helping to save the world and everything...
2009-06-11 - Mars Attacks! is one of only two movies that I can think of which are based on trading card sets (the other being Garbage Pail Kids the Movie.) I first saw Mars Attacks in the theater with my friend Jeremy a little bit after we graduated from high school, which was a heavy theater-going time for me. I think I was averaging about 1 flick every two weeks or so during that time because I finally had a car and could go by myself, not to mention that I worked the night shift and there wasn't much else to do during the day when I couldn't sleep.

By this time I was a pretty big fan of Burton's, having basically come of age watching Pee Wee's Big Adventure, Batman and Batman Returns, Beetlejuice, and Edward Scissorhands. I also loved Ed Wood, which I saw after picking up Plan 9 From Outer Space on clearance at my local Media Play based on the tag line that it was the worst movie ever and loving it. When Mars Attacks came out I thought Burton could do no wrong and I fully expected to fall in love with the flick. Sadly I didn't. Actually I hated it the first time I saw it. I've never been a big fan of CGI and the flick is loaded to the gills with it, which surprised me since one of the reasons I dug Burton so much was his amazing work with practical effects and set design. It didn't help that I wasn't all that familiar with the card set and I was kind of getting sick of the trend where actors would play multiple parts in films (ala Eddie Murphy.)

There was one scene in the flick that I loved though, enough so that years later when I was browsing through the $5 DVD section in Target I couldn't help but pick the flick up. The scene in question involves Sarah Jessica Parker and Pierce Brosnan. They both have their heads removed and there's this crazy moment when their severed heads are rolling around and then they come together with a kiss. While I was re-watching it recently it occurred to me that this is the key to this film. Sure it's got a silly plot and it's mostly about inane visuals, which typically makes me tune out while watching a film, but in this films case it's truly it's strength. See the flick is based on a trading card set, and at the end of the day that's all this film really is, a collection of crazy scenes that are very loosely connected into a story. Any one of these scenes would make an awesome trading card, and the inane plot which drives it would perfectly fit in a small caption, either on the front or as a summary on the back. The fact that Burton and Jonathon Gems (the screenwriter) would try and focus on this aspect of the source material astounds me. In fact it sounds more like a film school experiment than a big budget Hollywood film, which I think took a lot of guts and is also probably to blame for it's lack of acceptance.

This is what I would consider to be one of the perfect discount DVDs, one that I would have a hard time paying much more than the cost of a good lunch for. I do have to admit though that I probably wouldn't have as much admiration for it if another director had done it, but then again, I can't imagine too many other people out there who would have (well maybe the Chiodo brothers who brought us the classic Killer Klowns From Outer Space.)