Little green men from the angry red planet launch a flying-saucer attack on Earth in director Tim Burton's slow-starting space oddity, based on a bubble-gum card storyline from the 1960s. In both a tribute to and a spoof of 1950s B-movies, Burton stumbles as many times as he succeeds in playing with the back catalogue of lurid pulp sci-fi references. But once the computer-generated bug-eyed Martians arrive and strut their evil stuff, this daffy Independence Day lampoon comes alive. Among an amazing roster of stars, Pierce Brosnan is hilarious as a presidential adviser and Lisa Marie is weirdly creepy as a disguised alien temptress.

A fleet of Martian spacecraft surrounds the world's major cities and all of humanity waits to see if the extraterrestrial visitors have, as they claim, "come in peace." U.S. President James Dale receives assurance from science professor Donald Kessler that the Martians' mission is a friendly one. But when a peaceful exchange ends in the total annihilation of the U.S. Congress, military men call for a full-scale nuclear retaliation.