Mars Attacks!

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Year:	1996
Country of origin:	USA
Director:	Tim Burton
Genre:	Sci-fi parody
Starring:	Jack Nicholson, Glenn Close, Annette Bening, Pierce Brosnan, Sarah Jessica Parker, Danny DeVito, Martin Short, Michael J. Fox, Tom Jones, Rod Steiger, Natalie Portman, Pam Grier
Rating:	4/5
IMDB link:	http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0116996/
Tagline:	Nice planet. We'll take it!
Favourite line:	"They blew up Congress!"

Wilfully silly sci-fi pastiche that takes the paranoid excesses of fifties sci-fi schlockers as a starting point and simply adds a twist of parody.

The plot:
Mars Attacks!
Simple as.

Well, there's a little more to it than that, obviously, but to say too much would be to give the game away for the eight sci-fi nerds out there yet to see this flick. (Don't get cross, nerds, I'm one of you, too.)
The comedy angle is a hit and miss affair, some of it laugh out loud funny, some of it misfiring spectacularly, particularly the sequences involving Brosnan, not a man put on this Earth to bring the gift of laughter.
Nor Tom Jones, for that matter.
Indeed, two or three of the best lines go to the old Nan character, a wonderfully dry performance by Sylvia Sidney as the loopy old dear, giggling with senility as chaos reigns supreme around her. The best moment in the movie is her standout scene: As the Martians turn their ray guns on the members of the US Congress, we cut to her watching on TV, laughing riotously as she proclaims "They blew up Congress!"
I did chuckle at that bit.
Burton deftly handles the CGI heavy action sequences, but it is Danny Elfman's wonderfully evocative score that truly shines here, bringing to mind perfectly late night TV fodder such as The Thing From Another World and The Day the Earth Stood Still.
Not Burton's best movie by a country mile, this is still an entertaining enough movie in its own right.