Who knew all this time that despite there being no breathable air on the surface of Mars, an entire race of creatures could populate the planet and just live underneath it, where there’s plenty of oxygen? While it has a lot of scientific perplexities such as this, Mars Needs Moms is still an enjoyable, heart-warming movie with a great message. Although, it could have been done much better.
A young boy named Milo (Seth Green, Seth Robert Dusky) becomes a stow-away on a rocket bound for Mars. Martians have kidnapped his mother (Joan Cusack) in order to use her powers of discipline and order to program “nannybots” to take care of their children. It’s up to Milo and a hidden resistance including a human named Gribble (Dan Fogler) and a martian named Ki (Elisabeth Harnois) to save his mother and bring enlightenment to the alien race.
The very first thing I noticed about this movie is that the animation just was not up to par with what people have been doing in motion capture. It felt like something made as a test while leading up to The Polar Express, though the scale of the settings were impressively larger than expected. The film is never a pretty film to look at, with its grotesque alien lifeforms and its far-from-natural-looking humans. There’s some very heavy-handed and ultimately useless symbolism centering on the fact that the color scheme for most of the movie is browns, grays, and the like. This mixed with the subpar animation makes it a little unsettling to sit through at times.
But what surprised me the most is how as things progressed, I went from not really liking a lot of the characters to really falling in love with some of them. Milo starts out as an annoying little brat, but he’s never over-the-top as far as movie kids go. He’s just a kid and once he understands the drastic responsibility he has to take on, he begins to man up in a natural way. Gribble is introduced as an annoying slob who constantly utters nonsensical references to 80′s movies and television, but over time he does this less and as you learn about his character you begin to sympathize with him a lot more. The only character who isn’t developed at all is Ki, who is basically Gribble only with 70′s references, so more like a Hippie than an 80′s kid. She continues to act this way throughout the film and never gains any sort of characteristics other than that. The villain, the Supervisor (Mindy Sterling) never feels like a huge threat and is incredibly wooden, so she’s barely even worth mentioning other than to point out that the villain sucks.
I wish I could say a lot more about Mars Needs Moms but I don’t really want to spoil anything because I do recommend it. I think the ending could have been altered slightly and become a much more fascinating story, but I do like the way things work out in the end. But other than the sporadic, unnecessary, dated references (which are never really overbearing), the story gets pretty emotional and brings a third act worth the price of admission.
Final Verdict: 