I Rather Liked the Tone of This SPOILERS

Mars Attacks has its haters...but it is rather a subversive movie in its own way, don't you think?

Famously, it came out as a Christmas attraction at the end of 1996 after the more "serious" version -- Independence Day -- had been a big summer hit the same year.

Independence Day was the much bigger hit -- with the much more impressively "big" destruction effects -- but as the years since have proven, the director of ID4, Roland Emmerich, was rather a "master of cheesy disaster" type guy, off to make a successively worse group of "big D" films that have devolved down to 2012 and Moonfall.

Mars Attacks was a smarter and more nasty bit of business. The director was "major" -- Tim Burton, though the screenwriter, Jonathan Gems, seems to have come out of nowhere. Didn't do much before Mars Attacks, didn't do much after. Still the intelligence level must have come from SOMEWHERE. The original horrific trading cards?

The tone I liked was simple: hire a pretty impressive "all star cast" led by prestige superstar Jack Nicholson (in TWO roles)...and kill pretty much each and every one of them, including the killing of Jack two times.

The first kill -- of Paul Winfield playing an ineffectual general based on Colin Powell -- was pretty gruesome stuff for a comedy -- watching his grimacing head remain on his body as the rest of it was turned into a "skeleton X ray" that killed Winfield's body as his face stayed in agony.

And then they killed another star that way. And another. And another. With some other, different gruesome deaths along the way that WEREN'T doe with the X-ray guns. (How about dropping a chandelier on First Lady Glenn Close? Or creating a little robot creature to crawl around President Jack Nicholson's back, stab him through the heart, and plant a martian flag on his body?)

Mars Attacks is a Mean Murder Fest of a comedy, and that tone keeps it on track for me.

It was simile to nuclear war in its time, but now you can align it with climate change or COVID-19, you pick 'em. The near annhilatiation of everyone on the planet. A handful of survivors left to start over.

The movie stakes out progressive credentials for those survivors: the President's hip teenage daughter, the "hippie misfit" teenage son of a military trailer trash family; the old grandmother who had been shipped off to a nursing home(and whose music ends up killing all the martians when properly played over loudspeakers) ..and the Mexican Mariachi band, all that remains to play the Star Spangled banner on the decimated steps of the US Capitol in a city razed to the ground. Plus -- in another part of DC -- an earnest black family led by JIm Brown and Pam Grier(just one year before her "Jackie Brown" comeback -- but she came back here, too.)

And: across the US in Lake Tahoe: Tom Jones(the real one) and hippy New Ager Annette Bening.

Mars Attacks is as hopeful for its survivors as it is wryly contemptuous of the multi-millions who get killed.

And it has somewhat of a conservative bent before the progressive ending: all of the government who seek "peace" with the Martians, get slaughtered by them, and KEEP SEEKING PEACE even in the face of murderous intent - well, they get theirs and we get ours because of their stupidity.

I tell ya, this movie has too much on its mean little mind to have been THAT disparaged in its day.

Its creepy, too. Pierce James Bond Brosnan endsd up with only his head kept alive; Sarah Jessica Parker ends up with HER head on her chiwauha's body. The raging sexpot(Lisa Marie) who seduces White House PR smarm Martin Short tears off her face to reveal the monster within. Etc.

A classic? No. A blockbuster? No. A great movie? No.

But...a very GOOD movie strictly in terms of the courage of its convictions. Cast a bunch of stars. Kill almost all of them. Make a statement about how the end of the world might happen, how generally powerless we are to stop that...but how we just might be able to save a semblance of society, after all.

Laugh and get scared.