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R: ARCHIVE, S: REVIEWS, D: 12/19/1996,

Mars Attacks!

It's been a good year for little green men. The most enduring cinematic image of 1996 was of the White House being zapped to smithereens by an alien death ray in Independence Day. Now, in the wake of that supersmash, comes Tim Burton's intergalactic romp, Mars Attacks!

Heavy with irony and criss-cross cultural references, Mars Attacks! betrays the same fondness for schlock that has marked much of Burton's work. State-of-the-art special effects (à la Independence Day) re-create the you-can-see-the-string stuff of '50s sci-fi flicks -- often hilariously. A galaxy of stars (Jack Nicholson, Glenn Close, Annette Bening, Pierce Brosnan, Danny DeVito, etc.) ham it up with end-of-the-world abandon -- sometimes tiresomely so.

The real stars of the show are the invading Martians, the most disagreeable extraterrestrials since Aliens. These duplicitous, depraved little monsters are effusively nihilistic, gleefully violent -- an army of Butt-heads. The mayhem they cause reflects how things would be if the planet were overrun by teenagers. (The real horror: it is.) Mars Attacks! is a bit too daft to be satire, but it's sure to elicit a few huh huhs. At the Cheri, the Fresh Pond, and the Circle and in the suburbs.

-- Chris Wright