MARS NEEDS MOMS* Rating: PG-13.* Running time: 1 hour, 28 minutes.
Sometimes charming and sometimes labored, “Mars Needs Moms” tells the story of Milo, a kid who learns to appreciate his mother only after she is abducted by space aliens.
“Mars Needs Moms” floats about 45 minutes worth of story in an 88-minute ocean. The boy – motion-captured by actor Seth Green and voiced by 11-year-old Seth Dusky – stows away to rescue his mother (Joan Cusack), and the rest of the film details his efforts. Obviously, he can’t succeed right away or else the movie would never make feature length.
What’s good about the film is that it offers more than a single stretched-out storyline. Martian civilization is detailed as a very particular police state, in which the female Martians rule the planet and make up the entire military. Still, these ladies need to import mothers from Earth.
There are odd undercurrents here that seem not subtle so much as unconscious. Is this motion-capture animation suggesting that women in power are de-feminized or that women with small children shouldn’t work? And what are we to make of the Martian women speaking a dialect that sounds Asian, while the lowly tribes people who live out on the fringes have a vaguely African cast?