Sunday, May 8, 2011

Mars Needs Moms - Movie Review


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Starring Seth Green, Dan Fogler, Joan Cusack and Mindy Sterling. Directed by Simon Wells.

Caught this at the $1 theater. This is the next, and possibly last, installment of Robert Zemeckis's motion-capture animation experiment. We've had The Polar Express, Beowulf, A Christmas Carol, and now this, and this is the weakest effort to date.

It's based on a story by Berkeley Breathed, but without his unique animation style, what's the point? It follows a boy whose mom is kidnapped by Martians. He stows away on one of the spaceships and lands on Mars, a planet of metal tubes and trash-heaps. This naturally forces me to flashback to the far superior Wall-E.

Also, when I think about the societal structure of Mars and how it came to be, it collapses like a house of non-laminated cards.

I would say do not show this to a kid whose mother has died, as we see a different mother get vaporized in front of her son.

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