Dan O’Bannon

(In French, On Cable TV, October 2022) I have long learned to take the promise of a strong crew with some leeway—film history is littered with great writer-director-producer combos that simply didn’t spark, and you can add Invaders from Mars to that list. It’s easy to get excited with some of the names involved here—Tobe Hooper as the director (back when his name wasn’t necessarily a guarantee of disappointment—this film would be a turning point), Dan O’Bannon co-writing the script, Stan Winston and John Dykstra on special effects… plus being produced by Cannon Pictures, again at a time when the company was in the middle of what we now recognize as the 1980s genre corpus. But Invaders from Mars is, from its early moments, not as much a disappointment as a film consciously made for kids. (But was it?)  The very familiar plot elements are the kinds of things that work really well if this is one of the first movies you see, but are irritating to anyone with some film literacy. As the film boldly rediscovers the basic blocks of horror/science fiction (via an alien invasion of a small town as discovered by the teenage protagonist—cue the clichés), it just becomes increasingly tiresome. Hooper’s execution is nothing more than fair, making the entire thing unremarkable in the end. I realize that we’re at the point in Invaders from Mars’ history where the film is more likely to be a fond childhood memory than something that fans actively champion, and that happens—not everything survives as well two generations later. That too, along with a healthy skepticism about creators’ ability to knock it out of the park every time, is part of being a seasoned film fan.