MARS NEEDS MOMS (2011) (a review)

MARS NEEDS MOMS (2011) (a review)

The lastest from Robert Zemekis (Polar Express, Back to the Future). This is a motion caption animation where actors act out the movie and the computers translate it into animation. Seth Green (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Family Guy, Robot Chicken) acted as the lead child, but they brought in a child to voice it.

The story: A boy gets mad and wishes he didn't have a mom right when aliens come down and capture his mother. See, the martians don't have moms and they need them so they capture them from Earth but then kill them. Now the boy (who got onto the alien space ship), has to save his mom from the aliens.

Was it good?

No.

And the problem comes down to story. The whole reason the martians are stealing moms is because the matians have no maternal instinct so they need to steal moms to program nanny-bots to raise children. Huh? How does that make sense? And even moreso, is it even interesting? When you think of martians capturing humans does that really sound like a cool reason for them to be taking them? And then of course it turns out they used to have moms and then just gave it up or something. Which, of course, has nothing to do with the relationship the boy and his mom so it's almost like the real drama should be between the martians and maybe the boy shouldn't be the protagonist at all.

So...yeah. There's a lot I liked about the movie. Others have compained about the animation, but I actually liked it more than Pixar where the people look oddly plastic to me. And there are a lot of fun stuff. I like where the boy wishes he didn't have a mom and then his mom is stolen. That was a nice beat. However, most of the stuff that happens on Mars just wasn't interesting.

Normally, I would give it a rental rating because I did think the animation was cool, but really there are so many other better animation projects out there, you should just pass this and go to something better.

*** AVOID ***