Mars Needs Moms, review
This film is far from stella, but it's still aimiable entertainment. Rating: * * *
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By Sukhdev Sandhu 6:02PM BST 07 Apr 2011
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Dir: Simon Wells; starring: Joan Cusack, Seth Green, Dan Fogler. PG cert, 88 min
Mars Needs Moms, directed by Simon Wells and based on a book by the delightfully named Berkeley Breathed, is an old-fashioned morality tale dressed up in super-spangly 3D and in grabby motion-capture animation techniques.
Its moral is simple: be nice to your mother and don’t ever claim that life would be better if she wasn’t around to tell you what to do.
That’s a mistake made by Milo (“acted” by Seth Green, but voiced by Seth Dusky), a whiny kid living in American suburbia. The next thing he knows is that his mater (Joan Cusack), who was silly enough to ask him to put out the rubbish and to eat his broccoli, is being whisked off to Mars by aliens. He runs, he leaps, he hangs on to their spaceship.
Mars turns out to be a mixed bag: part-penal colony which Milo has to escape, part-adventure playground whose views thrill him, part-laboratory where the person about to be experimented upon is his mother.
A raspy, lizard-faced crone called the Supervisor (Mindy Sterling) is planning to upload her memories in order to put her parenting skills at the service of the nanny robots who look after the planet’s female Martians. The male Martians? They’re thrown on to a huge, inferno-like dump where they’re surrogate-fathered by a raggle-taggle crew resembling Woodstock veterans.
Milo strikes lucky by befriending two outsiders: one is a hippy-ish Martian known as Ki (Elisabeth Bradley Baker) who became besotted with humans after watching a TV show; the other is an obese Chris Moyles-lookalike Gribble (Dan Fogler), a human whose mother was abducted years earlier.
Director Simon Wells is the great-grandson of H.G Wells. His last feature was The Time Machine (2002) and he has also worked on Flushed Away and Madagascar. Astral adventures and seat-of-pants animation is clearly his passion. But Mars Needs Moms is never quite airborne enough. Part of the problem is the characterisation. Wells, who co-wrote the script with his wife Wendy Wells, doesn’t give enough depth to Milo, who is either bratty and eminently smackable or unnervingly fearless. Gribble, always citing song titles by The Knack or Top Gun one-liners, is irritating and creepy. Most disappointing is the Supervisor: she needs a better back-story and more opportunities to flex her evil ways.
Details from other children’s movies – the wasteland motifs of Wall-E and Toy Story 3; the neon lighting and futurist corridors of Tron – keep cropping up. Questions nag away, too: wouldn’t Milo have frozen on Mars? How does he manage to survive after repeatedly falling hundreds of feet from the spaceship to the dump? Would Ki, as lithe as any of the Na’vi in Avatar, really be attracted to a sweaty chump such as Gribble? Talking about attraction, while the film is a huge improvement on previous motion-capture pictures such as The Polar Express and Beowulf, it won’t — with the exception of some Martian landscape shots — seduce the eye.
And yet, even if there’s nothing very outstanding about the film, there’s nothing hugely disappointing. Cusack gives her character a degree of tang and idiosyncrasy; a scene in which Milo sits in a desert cradling his mother’s head as she’s on the verge of choking to death is beautifully sound-designed and genuinely moving; the story canters along at a merry pace and doesn’t outstay its welcome. Far from stellar, it’s still amiable entertainment.
dan fogler, mindy sterling, elisabeth bradley, chris moyles, american suburbia, berkeley breathed, pg cert, seth green, adventure playground, animation techniques, simon wells, parenting skills, raggle taggle, rsquo, joan cusack, penal colony, gribble, martians, crone, motion capture
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