Sometimes charming and sometimes labored, "Mars Needs Moms" tells the story of a kid who learns to appreciate his mother only after she is abducted by space aliens.
In the course of the movie's first five minutes, young Milo complains about the smallest of chores, whines about having to eat broccoli, lies to his mother, hurts her feelings and expresses excessive enthusiasm for any entertainment involving zombies. The kid is a creep, a nuisance and a burden; and yet between the lines, the movie suggests that Milo is really just a fine little fellow, albeit with the minor faults and healthy obstreperousness of a boy his age. Talk about setting the bar too low, especially in a movie that kids will be watching.
"Mars Needs Moms" floats about 45 minutes' worth of story in an 88-minute ocean. The boy — voiced by actor Seth Green, who sounds remarkably like a real kid — stows away to rescue his mother (Joan Cusack), and the rest of the film details his efforts. Obviously, he can't succeed right away or else the movie would never make feature length. But what's good about the film is that it offers more than a single stretched-out story line. Martian civilization is detailed as a very particular police state, in which the female Martians rule the planet and make up the entire military. Still, these ladies need to import mothers from Earth.
There are odd undercurrents here that seem not subtle so much as unconscious. Is this motion-capture animation suggesting that women in power are de-feminized or that women with small children shouldn't work? And what are we to make of the Martian women speaking a dialect that sounds Asian, while the lowly tribespeople who live out on the fringes have a vaguely African cast?
In any case, this is all a learning experience for Milo, who soon realizes how much his mother means to him. After all, she loves him, she bandages his cuts, she hugs him and "she takes me to Disneyland." Hold it, what was that last one? Three guesses what company made this movie.
The faces of the characters have the slightly stunned look common to motion-capture and to Walter Keane paintings, but the details are sharply defined, and there was a genuine effort to make the 3-D count for something. The film's rich visuals buy it some goodwill, especially when seeing it as I saw it, on an IMAX screen.
But however you see it, the very best thing about "Mars Needs Moms" is the climactic scene, which is unexpected, fairly moving and flirts with areas and emotions one doesn't expect to see in a children's film. It's not quite enough to make "Mars Needs Moms" worth seeing, but it's enough to earn it a reasonable morsel of respect.
"Mars Needs Moms"
Our grade: C
Genre: Animated
Running Time: 88 min
MPAA rating: PG
Release Date: Mar 11, 2011
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