Home > Adventure >

Mars Needs Moms

Watch Now

Mars Needs Moms (2011)

March. 11,2011
|
5.4
|
PG
| Adventure Animation Family
Watch Now

When Martians suddenly abduct his mom, mischievous Milo rushes to the rescue and discovers why all moms are so special.

...

Watch Trailer

Cast

Similar titles

Reviews

Sexyloutak
2011/03/11

Absolutely the worst movie.

More
StyleSk8r
2011/03/12

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

More
Marva
2011/03/13

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

More
Bob
2011/03/14

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

More
billosaurus
2011/03/15

This movie is that special level of bad. The company that made the 2007 Beowulf, polar express, and that Jim Carrey Christmas Carroll also developed this turd, pretending to be a movie. And it was a fatal mistake. This mars needs moms failed to make any money, and caused image movers digital to fuse back with image movers. It was the worst received Disney-branded movie! Anyway, onto the plot. Good grief. So, on the magnificent red planet, deep below ground. Where secrets don't keep. And anger is restless. Lives this old alien woman with a cane toad face, who is talking to a noseless alien with cat eyes, and... Orange gums. And an, ahem, curvy, attractive figure... Because there needs to be SOMETHING for accompanying adults to enjoy. Anyway, empress Pauline of mars, the even more ugly alien, I mentioned earlier, is too much of a workaholic to raise her own kids, as are all the other martians. So every few years, she absorbs the memories of human mothers into her robots to raise her own babies. Because HUMAN babies have the same needs as MARTIAN babies. Sure, whatever. They spot one mother who is ordering her offspring to take out the rubbish. This offspring's name is Milo. He is a poorly rendered CGI rhesus monkey, I mean, human. Sorry, Milo really does look like he should be climbing the ancient temples of India, screeching and harassing tourists. Anyway, Milo was only helpful at carrying out rubbish so the aliens can think his mother is a strict and able parent to be plot convenient. Once out of the reach of the alien's super telescopes, he reveals his true colours. Milo is a manipulative brat who whines when his dad cancels cinema night, which can be easily rearranged for another night, so it fails at being an overdone 'my parents missed a special even in my childhood' moment. When made to eat broccoli, Milo does something sweet: he kindly donates the nutritious vegetables to his cat, and lies to his mom, claiming to have eaten them himself. which goes as successfully as you'd expect feeding greenery to a mammal of carnivora would go. When the poor kitty cannot keep his meal down, he up chucks it in front of his master's mother, ratting him Milo out. Milo decides to pull off the old 'you have to be more specific' card when told to go to bed, obnoxiously hopping on the bed, rather than laying in it. His mum gets annoyed. When she wishes she didn't have to be so nagging, Milo verbally expresses his resentment of having a mother, in her face. Sure, the mom overreacts, but this is still a horrible thing for a child to say. The aliens very politely abduct his mom, right after Milo stated he wished she wasn't around, deciding they'd be the monkeys paw and grant his wish to teach him to be cautious and stuff. Milo observes the spaceship taking off, hits the metallic multi-ton space vessel with a wooden stick, because his cruelty is rivalled by his idiocy, gets his shirt caught on the side of the ship, and exposure kills him when it takes off. He is somehow shut into a chamber on the ship, via mechanical hoodoo, and gets sent to mars via unexplained wormhole travel. When on mars, he is in a chamber that gets dark. He panics as a voice tells him to go down the trash chute. Under the Underground lies a world of trash, which evokes awe from Milo. The immature male martians are inferior to the females, ergo the females throw them in the trash along with their rubbish. No, I'm not kidding. Among them is gribble, a human self-proclaimed astronaut. He is the only human-looking human in this movie, sure, he looks like an ugly human, but he is nonetheless human in appearance. He has a pet bug robot who doesn't play any major role. He says every few years, martians steal earth moms, use their memories to power robots, every few years to keep up with newer human trends, presumably. After extracting memories, a solar- powered laser BLASTS THE MOMS TO ATOMS!!!! Yes, that's a lovely idea for children to ponder. Milo tries to save his mom, but gribble rigs his plan to fail, and have him fall into the trash world again. But Milo finds gribble has been kidnapped. So he goes up again, rescues gribble, and befriend the nose-less cat woman alien with the hourglass figure and gingivitis. She hooks up with gribble... Okay. They fall into the trash world again... And then into Pandora world from James Cameron's avatar. There, they discover a mural of a martian family raising babies. They decide families are awesome. So they try to save Milo's mom and change the emperor martians mind. It turns out gribble is really named George Ribble at birth and his mom was killed in front of him. and life on the planet had traumatised him. Milo races to save his mom, wakes her up, naked baby aliens attack the adult aliens, evil emperor alien is saved, Milo almost dies because he gives his helmet to his mom, and Gribble's old helmet he left in the desert still is intact. Also, humans only need helmets to survive on mars, not full spacesuits. The Martians learn family values. Gribble hooks up with the cat alien, and lives on mars. And Milo goes home with his family and lives happily stupid after. The end.

More
Adam Foidart
2011/03/16

"Mars Needs Moms" looks good (the motion capture technology is a little jarring at first, but each effort from Robert Zemeckis looks better than the last) but most of the time it's surprisingly empty. This film, directed by Simon Wells is about a kid named Milo (played by motion capture, and looking very much like Seth Green, but voiced by Seth Dusky) who witnesses his mom get kidnapped by Martians, just after her made a nasty comment to her and hurt her feelings. He follows her by clandestinely jumping on one of their ships and sets off to rescue his mom. On Mars, he meets a helpful alien named Ki (Elisabeth Harnois), and a kid who also had his mom captured by aliens, but is now all grown up, named Gribble (Dan Fogler).For some reason, I'm feeling generous and I'm giving this movie a 2,5/5. Not really because I can think of a lot of things the movie did well, but mostly because I heard so much plain awful things about it that my expectations were just impossibly low. Even then I could recognize that the plot feels padded, with several scenes being included seemingly only to show off the technology as the characters fall downpipes and chutes (which would have looked great in 3D, but otherwise just feels excessive). I also felt that choices made to make the plot more lively, like having the Martian Ki talk in 1970's lingo just doesn't work. Like at all. It has a few moments with heart, as we can all relate to feeling guilty about being nasty to our mom at a certain point, but the movie doesn't go far enough with any of its characters or ideas. This needed to have more bite to make it stand out, or more laughs, or more excitement. It needed more something because there's not much here. It isn't total trash and it's pretty harmless but it's really just a forgettable family film. (2-D version on Blu-ray, September 11, 2012)

More
SnoopyStyle
2011/03/17

Milo is a bratty boy who constantly bump heads with his exhausted mother. After yet another fight, his mother is kidnapped by Martians and he sneaks on board the spaceship. On Mars, all female babies are raised by robots and they intend to use mom's brain to program the robots.The animation is motion capture CG and it looks OK. It's not top of the line but at least it doesn't look weird. I think the aliens look cartoonish and silly. This being a kids movie, having silly looking aliens may have been the goal.The kid is really unlikeably bratty. Right off the bat this movie gets off on a bad tone. He's more whiny than heroic or funny. I kill for a joke that actually works. A female lead may be a better choice.The story is passable, but I don't see it as anything special. Apparently the kid has to go to another planet before he realizes that he loves his mom. It's not a horrible kids movie if you grade on the curve and didn't know that it costed $150M to make. No movie that cost $150M should have a stupid name like 'Mars Needs Moms'.

More
Turfseer
2011/03/18

According to Wikipedia, 'Mars needs Moms', was the 5th biggest box office bomb in motion picture history. It cost about $150 million and the lifetime, world-wide gross was a little over $21 million. So where exactly did it go wrong? It's one of those films made using motion capture technology. The critics were split on the use of that technology: some dug it quite a bit and others found the characters to be like Madame Tussaud wax figures. Personally, I wasn't bothered by actors who had their movements and facial features, filled in by the magic of computer animation. And if you wait for the end credits, you'll see outtakes of just how the cast looked, when acting as 'motion capture' subjects.'Mars' is based on a sci-fi, black comedy picture book of the same name by Berkeley Breathed. The adaptation is geared much more for adults than kids as it has quite a bit of a dark sub-text, that perhaps is a bit too off-putting for many viewers. For starters, nine-year-old protagonist Milo's declaration during the film's opening scene, that he wished he never had a mother, is a bit jarring; this especially after his mother merely asks him to take out the garbage and punishes him for not eating his broccoli. The kid immediately regrets his harsh rejoinder and spends the entire time trying to make up for the faux pas. The heartbroken look on the mother's face stays with you despite the fact that such a harsh statement emanates from a kid's mouth.If there is a positive side to the film, it's in the action adventure component. Milo's adventures, as he manages to stow away on the ship that's his kidnapped Mom now finds herself on, and how he escapes initial capture on the Red Planet, are exciting moments indeed. The idea of Gribble, the man-child, who jokes how he's a secret astronaut from an 80s Reagan era program but is actually like Milo (a kid who tried to save his Mom), doesn't quite hit the mark, not only because he's a buffoon but the fact that he's been stranded on Mars since his childhood after his Mom was also kidnapped. What's worse is that he actually witnessed the Martians performing their own version of a lobotomy on his Mom and failed to save her, which I would think is a disturbing idea for young viewers to take. There's more noir to endure when we discover that the Martian world is a vast police state run by females only (the childlike, ineffectual males are beneath the surface, existing in a giant trash compactor). The females are headed by 'The Supervisor', the film's antagonist, a Lady MacBeth-like, crazed control freak, who resembles a shriveled up, Spielberg Extraterrestrial. The mad Supervisor is a fun character and is pitted against Ki, who adopts the language of Hippies from an early 70s TV sitcom, which she finds in some secret files, she's assigned to oversee. Ki is the Mar's version of a beatnik, who enjoys painting colorful graffiti on the drab Martian home world. My problem with the Ki character is why is she the only one to break away from the pack? There seems no explanation for it, in the context of the story. Milo only has a few hours to save his mother, and you probably can guess the film's denouement if you haven't seen the film yet. It's all rather predictable and the film's scenarists lost a big opportunity when they failed to develop Milo's mother as a fully developed character. Instead of having her disappear for most of the narrative, strapped to a gurney, wouldn't it have been better if the Martians made her a sentient overseer—directing the nannybots (who also could have had interactional capabilities) in proper parenting techniques (a more animated Picard Locutus, is the character I'm thinking of).For sheer action, Mars needs Moms, has some clever action scenes. But essentially it's a rescue story, and most of the characters prove to be decidedly one-note. It's worth watching, but deserves only an average rating.

More