Mars Needs Moms - 2 1/2 smiles

First of all, don’t see a 3D movie unless the director filmed it with 3D in mind, like James Cameron’s Avatar. Paying that extra 3D-glasses surcharge for a movie that really doesn’t benefit from 3D is just idiotic and the picture quality suffers when moves are shot with regular cameras and then converted to 3D. It’s an obvious grab by the studios to get more money from the movie-going public and I resent it. Tickets are expensive enough as it is. Okay. ‘Nuff said. Nine-year-old Milo (Seth Green) finds out how much he needs his mom (Joan Cusack) when she’s nabbed by Martians who plan to steal her parenting skills. Milo stows away aboard the spaceship and with the help of a tech-savvy, underground earthman Gribble (Dan Fogler) and a rebel Martian girl called Ki (Elisabeth Harnois), sets out to save his mom.

“Mars Needs Moms” has a message that all mothers will appreciate: value your mother even though she may nag you to do the right thing. But it could also be considered antifeminist because the ruling class consists of militant females who, like the Amazons of Greek myth, separate and discard the male babies shortly after birth. (This isn’t exactly a message you want the kiddies to grasp, however.) And because the females can’t be bothered with raising children, they create robots to raise the girl babies while sending the male babies to the vast garbage pits below the city, the place where the males, second-class citizens, live and work. And interestingly enough, the dialect the women speak sounds Asian and the leader even looks Asian while the men look and sound vaguely African. “Mars Needs Moms” isn’t enhanced by the motion-capture technology use to create the characters. Motion capture done well, like Gollum in The Lord of the Rings trilogy or in Avatar, can be both amazing and seamless. When you have all of the characters developed via motion capture, things seem awkward and it gives the film a creepy look. Although the film has a couple of genuine emotional moments, it’s not enough to give “Mars Needs Moms” a must-see recommendation. 3/14/11