In December of 1897, H. G. Wells gave us the novel The War of the Worlds. Yes, it’s been over 120 years since we imagined being invaded by the aggressors from Mars. The God of War and his red planet have been busy with propaganda in the cold war against Earth for as long as pop culture can remember. Lest we’d heeded the warnings, we’d have been doomed by the beings on that desolate world long ago. After facing World War I and the Great Depression, we had seemed to have forgotten our common enemy among the stars. By 1938, we’d all but forgotten the story of how Mars attacked us the first time. When Orson Welles narrated The War of the Worlds on a live radio broadcast, countless people, who had apparently never delved into the fringe genre we now call science fiction, thought we were being invaded by an army from another world. Luckily, we were able to stop the Martians by giving them a case of the sniffles, common for us, but fatal for the invaders.
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Mars is a dangerous place, and if we were not careful, we’d be invaded again. The 1950s was the Golden Age of Martians attacking us on film. We consumed drive-in movie after B-movie, cheese fest after sci-fi classic. We couldn’t get enough of aliens. We were on the verge of the space age, and we’d recently learned to mold plastic ray guns. The entire population, all the way down to five-year-old Timmy from Smalltown, USA was ready to defend our soil. Alas, we grew complacent, calling it entertainment as Mars prepared for war.
We rested on our laurels for decades until the Topps Company warned us again. In 1962, Topps introduced us to their new line of trading cards depicting gruesome, yet outlandish images of Martians murdering our servicemen, our salesmen, and even our dogs. The trading card art by Wally Wood and Norman Saunders depicted the most hideous creatures imaginable ruthlessly torturing, dismembering, and vaporizing Earthlings — all to the glee of the Martians (and collectors, if we’re being honest). Collectors continued to consume the creepy cards sporadically released for a few decades before the concept was finally put to film.
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It’s hard to believe Mars attacked Earth as recently as a quarter of a century ago. In December of 1996, a national flannel army lined up to see the Tim Burton directed Mars Attacks! With an A-list ensemble cast supported by the B-list, C-list, and maybe the most relevant to the plot soundtrack featuring the devastating “Indian Love Call” sung by Slim Whitman, Mars Attacks! bombed at the box office. It was clear we weren’t ready to embrace writer Jonathan Gems’ version of how the worlds war was won. Somehow, we survived.
Those who’ve seen the film were treated to a feast of cheese-filled zaniness from the opening scene of a stampeding inferno to the end scene featuring a mariachi band overseeing Taffy Dale (Natalie Portman) as she puts a medal on Richie Norris (Lukas Haas) before he delivers his reluctant hero speech. We saw a young gung-ho for war Jack Black issue his unforgettable “I surrender!” as he is plasma-blasted to smithereens. We watched as Sarah Jessica Parker shared her body with her chihuahua in the most humorously impossible way. The Martians are a malicious species who take pleasure in the destruction of their enemies, but they do it in a way that hearkens to the original cards by Topps. In the twisted humor of Mars Attacks!, a dove represents war. Ack! Ack!
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The arc of the story is a spiteful chicanery that builds the hopes of optimists only to tear it all down. “We come in peace,” indeed. We learn that we should have listened to the war-mongering military adviser, General Decker (Rod Steiger), all along by the time the hippy-dippy characters like Barbara Land (Annette Bening) realize their mistake. The Martians have not come in peace. They’ve come to attack! It’s in the title, for goodness’ sake. The cool, but ineffectually indecisive President Dale (Jack Nicholson, who plays a dual role as a slimy Art Land as well) does too little, too late. If there’s one lesson to be learned by watching Mars Attacks!, it’s that there is no negotiating. Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn) said it best, though he was talking about something else that we have no choice but to fight; “It can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop until you are dead.”
The Martians have no interest in sharing their technology, their knowledge, their culture, the secrets of the universe. They are a psychopathic race of ugly yuck faces who need to be killed. It’s us or them. Educate yourself. Today, we don’t have to wait decades for a new warning. We can listen to Slim Whitman any time we like, and we can watch Mars Attacks! on a whim. Stream it. Learn it. Live it. Then kill it dead before waiting for the Ack-Ack.
