BADass SINema Unearthed - Blu-ray 4K UHD Review

Thirty years later and the Martians are back, baby. ACK! ACK! ACK!

Watching Mars Attacks! again in 2026—now that Warner Bros. has finally dragged Tim Burton's beautifully deranged bastard onto 4K—I'm reminded that we didn't deserve this movie in 1996. We wanted Independence Day. We wanted Will Smith punching aliens, Bill Pullman giving speeches, fighter jets screaming through the sky, and America saving the goddamn universe. Burton gave us Jack Nicholson playing two different assholes, Sarah Jessica Parker's head attached to a Chihuahua, Tom Jones fleeing Las Vegas, and Martians vaporizing Congress while laughing like caffeinated toddlers. Audiences didn't quite know what to do with it.

Thirty years later? I think Burton might have been onto something.

Because Mars Attacks! isn't really interested in aliens. It's interested in us, and Burton's opinion of humanity isn't particularly flattering. President Dale keeps insisting diplomacy will work. Pierce Brosnan's Professor Kessler confidently explains creatures he knows absolutely nothing about. Rod Steiger wants to nuke the bastards. The media wants ratings. Nicholson's casino developer Art Land watches civilization collapse and practically starts calculating the square footage. Everyone believes they're the smartest person in the room right up until a Martian turns them into a glowing skeleton. Meanwhile, the Martians aren't even brilliant conquerors. They're just murderous little pranksters running around yelling "ACK!" and doing horrible shit because apparently horrible shit is hilarious. Frankly, I respect the commitment.

Nicholson. Glenn Close. Annette Bening. Pierce Brosnan. Danny DeVito. Martin Short. Sarah Jessica Parker. Michael J. Fox. Natalie Portman. Jim Brown. Pam Grier. Lukas Haas. Christina Applegate. Sylvia Sidney. And Tom fucking Jones as Tom fucking Jones. Burton assembles enough star power to populate three movies and then spends two hours gleefully murdering them. Nobody is safe. Celebrity means nothing. Political power means nothing. Intelligence means nothing. And when humanity finally needs saving, who gets the call? The military? Nope. Scientists? Hell no. The President? He's already a skeleton. Grandma and Slim Whitman save the fucking planet. That's not merely a punchline. That's art.

What really hits differently in 2026 is how astonishing it seems that Warner Bros. actually gave Burton millions of dollars to make this thing. There is no franchise-building bullshit. No cinematic-universe homework. No post-credit scene with one surviving Martian turning toward the camera to tease Mars Attacks 2: The Ackening. Burton took a series of gruesome Topps trading cards, dumped them into a blender with Dr. Strangelove, Ed Wood, EC Comics, '50s flying-saucer movies and his own gothic carnival brain, then apparently held the lid down while Danny Elfman cranked the theremin. The Martians don't look realistic. Thank Christ. They're walking trading cards with giant exposed brains, glass helmets and the emotional maturity of middle-schoolers who just discovered firecrackers. Photorealism would ruin them.

And that's why the damn thing has aged so beautifully.

Mars Attacks! belongs to that glorious stretch when you could walk into a theater and know almost immediately you were watching a Tim Burton movie. Beetlejuice. Batman. Edward Scissorhands. Batman Returns. Ed Wood. Then this lunatic thing. Crooked sets. Retro futurism. Monsters. Outsiders. Danny Elfman going absolutely bananas. Burton was given blockbuster money and somehow made a B-movie anyway. Better yet, underneath all the carnage is something unexpectedly sweet: the forgotten people ultimately matter. Richie and Grandma matter. Byron matters. Barbara matters. The politicians, generals, celebrities and rich assholes spend the movie talking while the people nobody notices actually accomplish something. Maybe Burton's heart wasn't quite as black as the comedy surrounding it.

Watching Mars Attacks! in 2026, though, might be the funniest joke of all. Politicians confidently explain things they don't understand. Billionaires see catastrophe and wonder how to monetize it. Television turns everything into spectacle. Experts talk. Everybody argues. Nobody listens. Half the population appears convinced somebody somewhere must know what the hell is going on. Burton looked at humanity in 1996 and essentially said, "These idiots are fucked." Thirty years later, I'm sitting in front of the new 4K thinking maybe he undersold it. Mars Attacks! hasn't become respectable with age, and thank God for that. It's still stupid, mean, colorful, hilarious, juvenile, strangely sweet and completely fucking nuts.

ACK! ACK! ACK! Long live the Martians.

4K Ultra HD + Digital Limited Edition Steelbook

Home Video Distributor: Warner Bros
Available on Blu-ray - August 11, 2026
Screen Formats: 2.39:1
Subtitles: English SDH, French, German SDH, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish, Czech, Danish
Video: Native 4K; Dolby Vision; HDR10
Audio: English: Dolby Atmos; Dolby TrueHD 7.1; DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1
Discs: 4K Ultra HD; single-disc set
Region Encoding: 4K region-free; blu-ray locked to Region A

Thirty years after Tim Burton unleashed his big-brained, trigger-happy Martians upon an unsuspecting planet, Mars Attacks! finally invades 4K Ultra HD. Jack Nicholson leads an absolutely ridiculous collection of stars into battle against little green bastards who promise peace, vaporize Congress, terrorize Las Vegas, and discover—much too late—that humanity's greatest weapon isn't the military.

It's Slim fucking Whitman. Newly remastered for its 30th anniversary and landing in a Limited Edition SteelBook, Burton's gloriously unhinged sci-fi satire has never looked or sounded better. Hide the politicians. Protect Grandma. Turn up the stereo. The Martians are back.

VIDEO

Warner Bros. finally gives Mars Attacks! the 4K treatment with a newly remastered 2160p Ultra HD presentation in its original 2.39:1 aspect ratio, and this is exactly the sort of movie that benefits from the format. Burton's intentionally artificial universe gets a noticeable kick from the increased resolution: costumes have more texture, faces are sharper, miniature work holds up surprisingly well, and those enormous Martian brains have all the slimy detail anyone could possibly want. More importantly, the image doesn't suddenly try to make Mars Attacks! look natural. This is a movie built out of comic-book colors, plastic surfaces, Vegas neon, retro sci-fi and Burton weirdness, and the 4K presentation embraces every damn bit of it.

The biggest beneficiary is the color palette. Reds, greens, purples and the glowing blasts from the Martians' insta-fry ray guns leap from the screen without turning the movie into some digitally juiced cartoon. Black levels are stronger, contrast has more punch, and Burton's nighttime sequences finally have the dimensionality previous home-video editions couldn't quite deliver. The CGI inevitably reveals its age in spots—these Martians were never trying to fool anyone into believing they were real—but that's part of the movie's handmade-meets-digital charm. Thirty-year-old effects and all, Mars Attacks! looks terrific. ACK-worthy, indeed.

AUDIO

The real surprise might be the new Dolby Atmos/TrueHD mix, which takes Burton's controlled chaos and lets it loose around the room. Flying saucers move across the soundstage, ray guns rip through the surrounds, explosions have considerably more weight, and the Martian invasion finally feels like an actual invasion instead of something happening politely across the front speakers. Dialogue remains clean despite the enormous cast and near-constant insanity, while the low end gets plenty to do once buildings start exploding and humanity begins having a very, very bad day.

But Danny Elfman's score is the reason to crank this bastard up. The theremin, brass and wonderfully oversized orchestration spread beautifully through the Atmos field, giving the score a scale perfectly matched to Burton's B-movie-on-steroids aesthetic. And when Slim Whitman finally enters the equation? Well, if I'm going to watch Martian heads explode because of "Indian Love Call," I damn well want the neighbors to hear it too.

Supplements:

Commentary:

• None

Special Features:

Here's where my enthusiasm gets vaporized a little. For a movie celebrating its 30th anniversary and making its 4K debut, Warner Bros. has given us approximately 18 minutes of new material. Eighteen. Minutes. Come on, guys. Mars Attacks! has an insane production history, an enormous cast, Tim Burton at peak Burton, early large-scale CGI, practical effects, miniature work, Topps trading-card origins and enough behind-the-scenes weirdness to fill a feature-length documentary. Instead, we get two featurettes. They're good featurettes—and Ack! Ack! Aesthetic is particularly interesting when digging into the movie's then-cutting-edge digital effects—but both are over almost as soon as they get interesting.

The good news is that the material itself isn't promotional fluff. The filmmakers actually reflect on Burton, the production and the unusual visual approach three decades later, which gives these pieces some substance. I just wanted more. Give me Burton. Give me surviving cast members. Give me Topps history. Give me concept art, deleted material, vintage EPK footage and somebody explaining exactly how Tom Jones wound up fighting Martians in a cave. For a movie this wonderfully strange, the supplements should have been equally nuts. Instead, Warner gives us a taste and then yanks the plate away.

• Looking Back on Mars Attacks! (7:26) – Filmmakers look back at working with Tim Burton and revisit the wonderfully bizarre experience of making one of the strangest studio science-fiction movies of the 1990s.
• Ack! Ack! Aesthetic (10:50) – A look at the movie's distinctive visual design and how its then-cutting-edge CGI helped bring Burton's cackling, oversized-brained Martians to life.

Mars Attacks! remains one of Tim Burton's most gloriously fucked-up creations, and its arrival on 4K is long overdue. The remastered image finally gives Burton's radioactive color palette the showcase it deserves, the Atmos track lets Danny Elfman and those murderous little bastards invade the entire room, and the Limited Edition SteelBook makes this an easy upgrade for collectors. The supplemental package should have been much more ambitious—18 minutes for a 30th-anniversary release is criminally stingy—but the movie and A/V presentation do the heavy lifting. Warner finally gave Mars Attacks! the 4K it deserved.

Now give us more extras, you cowards.

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