Mars Needs Moms (2011)

With a budget of 150 million dollar, Mars Needs Moms isn’t a cheap movie. It has been produced by Robert Zemeckis’ Imagemovers, who was also responsible for The Polar Express, Beowulf and A Christmas Carol. Mars Needs Moms was a big flop and it didn’t manage to recoup its costs. Is Mars Needs Moms really such a bad movie or did it just need a good marketing push?

The title perfectly describes the story. A society of aliens on Mars needs mothers to take care of their children. They remotely search for mother on earth that have the right qualities to raise a chid and kidnap them. Once they have done so they empty their brains and use the knowledge to create mother robots. While you were reading this you might be thinking if this is a movie you should watch with your kids and if this would be something they would enjoy. You would be right thinking so and this part of the story isn’t the only problem with this film.

Milo is the kid whose mother is kidnapped, of course after he has just had a fight with her. He wakes up after falling asleep in his bed and realises that he wasn’t nice to her and should apologize. The weird thing about this scene is that when he gets out of bed he first puts on his shoes and hoodie to go to his mother. Why would he do that late at night? Wouldn’t he just walk to her bed? The next scene makes it clear that he did this just to be able to go outside in the next scene to run after a spaceship. He ends up on Mars, which is ruled by women and where men live secluded on heaps of trash and are depicted as stupid creatures. Milo meets another human named Gribble, who has been stuck on the planet for years and of course they try to free Milos mother, with a little help of the locals. I don’t think I spoil anything by saying they succeed, but before that happens the young audience is first treated to a suffocating mother who seems to die as she doesn’t have a helmet.

Things like these make this movie feel inconsistent as a kids movie and when I heard Milo say that Mars needs Botox I’ve had it. How does a young kid know about botox and why does he think it’s a good idea?

It’s obvious that I think that Mars Needs Moms isn’t a good movie and then I haven’t even talked about the way the human characters look. Just look at the above image. This is the mother of the movie and she’s scary as hell. Definitely a case of uncanny valley. The techniques of this movie are also used in the new Tin Tin movie and I’m hoping that Spielberg makes a movie worth watching. This one however is one you can skip!

Score: 4