Mars Attacks! (1996)

Tim Burton adapted Mars Attacks! from the lurid 1962 Topps trading-card set, translating that series' gory, tabloid shock into an all-star invasion romp^[1]. His Martians descend in textbook flying saucers, chirp "we come in peace," then vaporize the welcoming crowd with death rays — a direct parody of 1950s B-movie first-contact fantasies and their earnest optimism. Burton himself called the film "a Mad magazine version of Independence Day"^[2], swapping heroic uplift for slapstick nihilism: humanity is saved not by missiles but by a corny country record. Where most invasion pictures treat the saucer as an object of awe or dread, Burton drains it of mystique and hands it to the punchline — less a thriller than a demolition of the flying-saucer iconography postwar culture had built up.