Mania Grade: C

5 Comments | Add

 

Rate & Share:

 

Related Links:

 

Info:

• Starring: Joan Cusack, Seth Green, Dan Fogler, Seth Dusky, Elisabeth Harnois, Mindy Sterling
• Written by: Simon and Wendy Wells
• Directed by: Simon Wells
• Studio: Walt Disney Pictures
• Rating: PG
• Run Time: 88 minutes
• Series:

Mania Review: Mars Needs Moms

Mars Needs Moms
© Walt Disney Pictures/Robert Trate

 It’s hard giving a marginal thumbs down to Mars Needs Moms because it has an incredibly sweet message at its heart. Your mom moves heaven and earth to keep you safe and help you grow up strong. If she seems mean sometimes, that will change when you graduate from medical school instead of selling your body on the streets for crystal meth. And if she ever disappears on you, you’re really gonna wish you’d just eaten your broccoli like she asked.

For the first ten minutes and the last twenty of Mars Needs Moms, that message resolutely overcomes creepy CGI, narrative clichés and a lot of unnecessary clutter. Joan Cusack’s harried mother resonates the perfect blend of selfless sacrifice and tough-but-fair discipline: a hard-working gal trying her best with a difficult son who she’s still raising right. That may be why forces from beyond this world want her so much. They raise their kids with nanny-bots on Mars, and the surrogates can’t function without an infusion of mom-ness straight from the source. So they ship Cusack off in the middle of the night, and her son Milo (Seth Green and Seth Dusky) suddenly realizes that only he can save her.

It makes for a swell finale, with some patented Disney mist for the eyes and gentle but important lessons delivered more or less painlessly in the process. The set-up works extremely well too, with the family dynamics securely established and Milo coming off as a basically good kid who can step up to the plate when he needs to. I haven’t read the Berkley Breathed children’s book on which this is based, but I imagine that those sections alone make for a first-rate bedtime story.

Unfortunately, a feature-length movie needs more than that, and in an effort to pad its message, Mars Needs Moms completely falls apart. Milo ends up in the Martians’ underground city, where the females live in a regimented Orwellian society while the males eke out a tribal existence in the vast garbage heaps below. There, Milo meets Gribble (Dan Fogler) another stowaway child who watched his own mom get abducted twenty-five years ago, and still acts like a kid even though he’s in his thirties. He provides wacky comic relief and some reluctant aid as Milo endeavors to rescue his own mother. They also pick up a sympathetic Martian girl named Ki (Elisabeth Harnois), who loves painting graffiti and thinks things really ought to change.

She’s fun to watch, but the remainder of the film grows far too enamored of the scenery for its own good. What began as a sweet little parable devolves into standard-issue kid’s sci-fi, with corny jokes and pratfalls clanking around in hollow high-concept set design.  The Martian culture also carries vague hints of sexism, with females as the evil oppressors and males as the fun-loving goofballs. Wells renders it largely harmless, but it still leaves an oily tang in the mouth.

Furthermore, the motion capture technology still has a long way to go before ridding itself of that plastic-fantastic sheen. The technology grows more sophisticated by the day, but the figures here still look more like wax figures than actual characters. Casting comic actors help – their exaggerated expressions convey emotion reasonably effectively – but the technology still proves to be a major distraction. (Ironically, the end credits shows scenes of the real actors performing in white sets with dots all over their faces; it’s kind of like letting your kid sit on Santa’s lap at the mall, then going into the locker room to watch him take off the beard and light up a doobie.)

That leads to a decidedly listless middle section stocked with soulless Hollywood tropes standing in for actual storytelling. Though Mars Needs Moms eventually rallies, it comes too late and succeeds mainly in reminding us how much better it should have been doing all along.  It has its heart in the right place, and earns its few moments of emotional resonance, but they don’t elevate the story past the thoroughly commonplace. Kids won’t mind, but parents may want to spend the cost of admission on the book instead; after all, shouldn’t good moms encourage their kids to read?