Mars Needs Moms | D

Mars Needs Moms is another brilliantly animated picture that fails to win our hearts. Despite the film's positive message to appreciate our moms, the movie was a box office flop its opening week. Its fault? The moral of the film extends to the film itself. Without the basic love and nurture for an infant storyline, a film cannot mature, no matter how advanced technology has become.

Mars Needs Moms tells the story of a boy named Milo (Seth Dusky, Big Time Rush) whose mother (Joan Cusack, Working Girl) is kidnapped by Martians. The boy gets on the space ship and arrives at a Martian base where human mothers are zapped for their disciplinary skills. In turn, these skills are transferred to nanny-bots, who raise female Martian children. The male Martians, meanwhile, are deposited in a lower floor level where they dwell in humongous trash heaps. As Milo embarks on a mission to rescue his mom, he makes quirky friends who help him along the way.

The imagery of the movie is beautiful and complex, but we have reached a point where we are desensitized by such visuals. We have seen more than our healthy dose of space ships and fantasy lands, and now it is increasingly harder for those things to captivate our attention. However, there is that one scene that stood out — when the alien Ki (Elisabeth Harnois, Keith) paints glowing flowers on a building. But other than that, the graphics are not memorable. Because of the performance capture technology used in this film, the visual style falls awkwardly between cartoon and live action. Sometimes the characters move realistically and sometimes they move mechanically, which causes us to feel a sense of discomfort.

Sadly, the humor and plot in Mars Needs Moms is unsatisfactory. Ki overuses hippie jargon, which is not funny at all. At the same time, Earthman Gribble (Dan Fogler, Kung Fu Panda) does not alleviate the damage. His enthusiasm exceeds what is desirable and pretty soon he becomes annoying. In addition, the romantic relationship between Gribble and Ki is completely random and unappealing. To top it off, we scratch our heads at the Martian's motives. Is it really easier to compile a system of robots, spaceships, laser beams, and human kidnappings than it is to raise Martian offspring?

Overall the movie has a surplus of visuals and a shortage of storyline essentials. Maybe the film could have done better if it was released on Mother's Day, but even then, it wouldn't have gotten much slack.