Susan Granger’s review of “Mars Needs Moms” (Walt Disney)
Clever title…too bad there’s nothing in this animated concept to flesh it out.
When his competent, caring Mom (Joan Cusack) is abducted while she’s sleeping and transported into outer space to teach nanny-robots how to discipline kids, nine year-old Milo (Seth Green, using the voice of Seth Robert Dusky) is determined to get her back from the stern, malicious Martian Supervisor (Mindy Sterling), who plans to drain Mom’s brain. After stowing away on a spaceship, he befriends Gribble (Dan Fogler), a tech-savvy, underground earthman, and a rebellious Martian girl, Ki (Elizabeth Harnois) who speaks hippie-style English that she picked up from watching ‘60s TV shows and spreads her own brand of flower-power grafitti.
Utilizing ImageMovers Digital, the performance-capture technology favored by producer Robert Zemeckis (Disney’s “A Chistmas Carol,” “Beowulf,” “The Polar Express”), Simon Wells, who helmed “The Son of Fgypt” and the 2002 remake of “The Time Machine” – and happens to be the great-grandson of H.G. Wells – directs actors who wear special LED-studded suits that are linked to an IMAX 3-D model in the computerized camera on a sterile set. As a result, their faces appear waxen and almost expressionless, although Zemeckis continues to describe the weird, awkwardly disconcerting visual effects as “digital makeup” that’s added to the digital hair and digital wardrobe.
Based on a book by Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Berkeley Breathed (“Bloom County”), the simplistic story by Simon Wells and his co-writer wife Wendy Wells is almost completely devoid of charm with little to be learned by youngsters in the audience about Mars’ multi-level matriarchal society in which all newly hatched males are cast into underground dumps, leaving the sprouting female infants to be raised by robots.
After an early viewing of this $175 million debacle, Disney closed ImageMovers and has since cancelled Zemeckis’s upcoming project “Yellow Submarine,” a proposed 3-D adaptation of the 1968 Beatles cartoon.
On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “Mars Needs Moms” is a tiresome 2 – risking alienation by aliens. Forget about the IMAX 3-D and wait for the dvd.
