Mars Needs Moms (2011)

It is official-this was a bad weekend for movies. And while I was lucky enough to not see any of these in theaters, it’s still a shame. The weekend is March 11th, 2010. And while in limited release we have Jane Eyre, which I have yet to see but has gotten great reviews, every single major release was bad. The big winner for the weekend was Battle: Los Angeles, an extremely dumb film that feels almost Cloverfield-esque, but without the awesome. Then we have Red Riding Hood, a movie that has earned its place in my bottom ten list for the year. And in the middle what existed was Mars Needs Moms. Arguably the single biggest financial flop of the year, this movie is one of the dumbest things to ever come out of the mind that was the great (or once-great, I should say) Robert Zemekis. What happened to this man? In the 80s he made what is arguably one of the greatest sci-fi comedy franchises of all time, Back to the Future. And then in the 90s he made Forrest Gump, which I hold to be one of the single greatest motion pictures ever made. His last directed movie was in 2009, when he made a CG version of A Christmas Carol, starring…Jim Carrey. Not funny 90s Jim Carrey, sad, depressing, crushing-on-Emma-Stone Jim Carrey. And while that video is pretty epic, it’s still very creepy. Wait, where were we? Oh. Right. Mars Needs Moms. This is an extremely stupid movie. The film shares its intelligence level with its buddies this weekend. It’s just so dumb. The movie follows 9-year-old boy Milo (played by Seth Green and voiced by Seth Dusky), who has mommy issues. After his mom tells him to do such terrible things like-eat your broccoli-he out right tells her that his life would be better without a mom. I want to slap this kid. Anyway, his mom (who is voiced by Joan Cusack) is then abducted by martains. Milo gets caught along with the ship. And he gets taken to Mars. There he meets Gribble (voiced by Dan Fogler), who holds a secret of his own (which is really not too difficult to figure out). And as they work together to help save Milo’s mom, they meet Ki, a hippie alien who talks just like she came out of a Cheech & Chong movie (but cleaner). None of these characters we care about. The movie doesn’t expect us to care about them. It just provides us with pretty visuals. And yes, the visuals are very pretty. The only person on the filmmaking team that has any visible work put into this is the art director. Whoever this is needs to get some kind of award nomination, because the film looks fantastic. I didn’t see it in 3-D, I saw it at home in plain old 2-D. But still, the film looks gorgeous. If anything, even if you’re just renting it for your kids, watch it with them for parts of it. Because it is phenomenal. But the rest of the movie, sadly, is not. And I know that Robert Zemekis only produced it, but he still could have saved it. He’s Robert Zemekis. He has some power in this world. NOTE: It seems fitting that Milo is really into zombies-he and all the other people in this movie look like one.
3/10