Here I spent all these nice words in 2010 talking about how this 3D animation thing is not only attracting the biggest crowds, it’s actually creating the best movies, too – and it takes exactly one (1) 2011 film to make me eat them.
Mars Needs Moms is an awful film. First it’s shot in that too-real 3D look used in films like Beowulf and The Polar Express. This look creeps me out. Check it:
On the left is Milo, Seth Green’s character from Mars Needs Moms, on the right is Seth Green, Seth Green’s character from life. Wow, that’s eerily similar. The question is why? It’s animated, you know that, right? You can make your cartoon look like, literally, anything. Why does it have to look like Seth Green? And of course, the mom looks like Joan Cusack and when Milo gets to Mars, the guy he runs into looks quite a bit like Dan Fogler. Why is this necessary? Then there’s the writing – to attract the younger crowd, Simon and Wendy Wells wrote a Martian character who grew up on 60s TV and spouts flower child catch phrases as if she were a member of Laugh In. It takes exactly one time for this to grow annoying. Not quite Jar-Jar annoying, but same ballpark – I kid you not.
The plot of Mars Needs Moms is not unlike what you would guess: it involves putting Joan Cusack’s brain into Martian robots so they can raise children because the Martian men are all slackers. Now this is just a silly conclusion because this version of Mars clearly lacks for team sports, video games and snack food. Exactly how are the men-folk supposed to slack, anyway? The action is all set to the grand theme of showing appreciation for your mother. It’s not a bad theme, per se; but the film is so replete with said cliché that one might ask “are we not showing enough appreciation for our mothers? Are we not giving them enough credit for birthing and raising us?” I guess not. We can politely ignore the fact that all the Martian men are sent to the junkpile. While Earth needs to appreciate moms; Mars seems to be doing OK without dad’s input.
There’s no shortage in the amount of disturbing here. Mars intelligence central has the ability to space travel and abduct without issue and yet the process of selecting reasonable moms from Earth may as well have been a blindfolded dart projectile for all the scientific study it took:
“There’s one!”
“No way, she’s indulgent.”
“There’s one.”
“Not actually a mom. Possibly a man in drag.”
“There’s one. She just said ‘no’ to her kid.”
“We have a winner!”
Or in this case, a loser.
Rated PG, 88 Minutes
D: Simon Wells
W: Simon Wells & Wendy Wells
Genre: Lame fantasy
Type of person most likely to enjoy this film: Mothers who have been dying for the animated world to recognize their contributions, finally!
Type of person least likely to enjoy this film: Sci-fi-philes
