Marte necesita mamás

This was quite a surprise: A Disney family movie rated PG with creepy animation, lots of dark scary scenes, aliens, homicides and attempted homicides and more! Why make a movie about children's mothers being abducted by aliens and murdered in some kind of giant laser machine? I guess it will grab kids' attention, but it will also scare them to death.

Aside from the crazy story line, which is not child-friendly, we have a new kind of animation that makes computerized characters look very much like real people. So, for example, the supposed 11-year old boy was modeled by a 35-year-old man, so that the kid looks like a cross between a kid and a middle-aged man. The forehead is expressive, but in a 35- year-old-man kind of way. You have to see this to understand. It is weird and a little scary.

Frightening, realistic aliens and robots chase a child while shooting at him with their ray guns, trying to kill him. They also try to kill his mother. They attempt to execute his friend in a firing squad. This all takes place in a dark and scary world where people run through long tunnels and dive into dirty chutes to spend some time in a giant fiery trash dump. The dump is inhabited by a monkey-like species of "stupid" creatures who wear primarily yellow, red and green clothing and have their hair in dreadlocks. I'm not kidding.

The character called Gribble, played by Dan Fogler, was an exception to the general drudgery of this film. He had a strange part to play in a weird script, but he brought a lot of energy and enthusiasm and a really unique style. It wasn't enough to save the movie, but he added at least two stars to my rating. The animation quality is good, but these days it's hard to count that for much. The story is just terrible and that's what really matters. Sorry, Disney, but I know you will overcome this setback.

I'm a mom. Milo looked and acted just like my 12-year-old son. ... I was touched by the film. Was it perfect? No. The '60s slang and cultural references bugged me. As a woman who grew up during the women's movement in the 1970s, I knew some people would be offended by the vaguely antifeminist themes. But it could be argued that there were some underlying "liberal" themes, too (antiestablishment politics, guerilla art, individuality, education, a sense of true history, anthropology, science, and other "revolutionary," anti-religious ideas).

It could be argued that women have made so much progress in our culture that they are fair targets as the "oppressor," too. It's important to note, that the flipside message of this film is that Mars needs dads, too. Though I really could not stand the way the men were portrayed in this film (mangy, goofy, dancing thingies in '60s hippie rags.) I'm not familiar with the book, but the cultural references seemed really, really out of synch with several generations, and I was alive in the '60s (as a child).

In the end, though, my geek side loved the motion-capture appearance of the film. We saw it in iMax 3D (the only way to watch these films), and were blown away by the animation. We are not offended by Disney technology and storytelling. We've seen the good side of Disney in so many ways at their theme parks, cruises (Castaway Cay!!!), etc. ... So, it saddens me to see a touching family film go down in flames because of a few storytelling defects, bad timing, and anti-Disney sentiment.

I guess I'm in the 'I liked it' camp. Frankly I am perplexed at the negative press and hatred thrown at this film. It's a Disney movie. That should tell you something. It will be a movie that adheres to some pretty strict rules. The movie will have to appeal to the broadest family audience possible. It will not have a lot of controversial social commentary. The conflicts in the movie will be resolved without bloodshed or body parts being flung about and the movie will have a happy ending. So what did you expect? Aside from that I thought all the actors did a fine job with their parts and I liked what was done creating the martian world. I'm sorry many people didn't find any likable characters. I liked them. The humans looked and acted like real people to me. I found Ki, the martian tagger, especially appealing. Why? Well, I don't want to deconstruct it too much. Let's just say I wish I'd known somebody with her personality when I was younger. As to all the nit picking, well yeah, I did that too. If they put in all the 'how did they eat, shower, go to the can, and buy food stuff the movie would have been 6 hours long! That's what you use your imagination for after the movie is over. It's too bad this movie didn't get any respect. It really deserved better.

I wasn't going to watch this movie at all because of the terribly low score (4) on IMDb. Luckily, my kids talked me into it, and I was very pleasantly surprised indeed.

I am amazed that this movie scored so low. Yes, granted, its nothing groundbreaking; there are plenty of well-worn formulas applied. But its far from unusual in this regard, and the story is full of fun situations and characters.

Visually, its very nice to look at, and I found myself thoroughly enjoying the time I spent watching it. So did my kids, 8 and 10, who both thought it was great! I don't usually review movies here, but I often check the ratings before watching films. In this instance, I am amazed at the low rating this film received, and feel its unrepresentative of the actual quality.

So 7/10 from me, and really at a loss as to how almost 30% of viewers could have possibly thought 1/10 was a fair rating!

The average rating for this movie by professional film critics is about 3.0 out of 5 stars. That average is realistic. I would probably give it 6.5 out of 10 if I could, but I didn't feel it was as bad as movies I've given 6 out of 10 stars, so I gave it a 7 out of 10.

The movie uses motion-capture computer animation to apply more realistic textures and movements to its characters, following movies like A Christmas Carol (which wasn't as good), Beowulf (which was much better), and The Polar Express (also much better).

Mars Needs Moms features a plot that wasn't demographically targeted correctly. It features a boy who needs to rescue his mother from awkwardly humanoid-looking Martians, but boys that age are working very hard to separate themselves from needing their mothers. It is a very natural consequence of a male's life. So while the movie might appeal to mothers, I'm not sure it will appeal to boys.

The next problem, which exacerbates the previous one, is its timing. The studio made a big, big mistake trying to release it at the same time as Battle: Los Angeles, and only a week after Rango. Parents already took their kids to Rango the weekend before, and the dads really wanted to see Battle: Los Angeles (especially after being sorely disappointed with the similarly themed Skyline last Fall).

A lot of movies in January through March have been juggled around recently, causing all sorts of problems. Many movies were yanked from their original release dates and moved out later in the year. But Mars Needs Moms should have been released in early January. It would have fared a lot better. As it is, the movie has been a complete disaster at the Box Office. I fault Disney for the poor release strategy (they were only the distributor, not the actual producer of the movie), and Simon Wells for the rest.

There is also the point that a lot of viewers were troubled by the Martians themselves. I think Simon Wells could have had his animators design them a little more intelligently. They seemed awkward to me -- they were humanoid, but slightly differenced to a degree that some people found disagreeable: legs too far apart, butts too big, and legs like they were inflated with air. Mr. Wells also made the mistake of giving the male Martians dreadlocks-like hair, which has accidentally incited a lot of racist remarks, although racial nods was not intended. (People really need to stop being oversensitive. Grow some skin, please!)

There is an army of people flaming the movie, however, and the computer animation is at the core of their argument, which is very curious. One critic said, "Mars Needs Moms stands as the potentially final Zemeckis-produced motion-capture effort, and, like The Polar Express, Beowulf, and A Christmas Carol before it, its characters boast the waxy complexions, unreal movements, and dead eyes of mannequins..." (Nick Schager, The Village Voice)

What the...? I'm confused here. What standard is this critic holding computer animated features to? I don't recall any waxy complexions or unreal movements or dead eyes of mannequins in any of these movies, or at least nothing that distracted me from the otherwise near photo-realistic computer animation that has only been around a few years. While they fall short of the realism of characters inserted into live action movies such as Peter Jackson's King Kong and Gollum, or George Lucas's Yoda in Star Wars episodes II & III, and certainly not the characters in Avatar, it didn't strike me as being a requirement in an animated feature to be THAT photo-realistic. Nobody complained about Shrek's movements being unrealistic or his eyes being dead as a mannequins, but clearly Shrek isn't being held to the same animation standard. What gives?

While I'm not going to defend Mars Needs Moms on every point, I don't understand the beating its taking from reviewers here at IMDb. It's a fairly average film from a director who isn't very good to begin with, with plotting that could have been better and could have been worse, and some character design that could have been more intelligent. But unfortunately there seems to be a subculture out there (probably made up of mostly teens, and maybe even competing film marketers and computer animation folk -- perhaps some Rango promoters attempting to keep its returns high in the second week) who are throwing one stars around IMDb with malignant glee. To give 1 out of 10 stars to this movie is dishonest, and an abuse of having a rating system in the first place. There were 404 people who gave A Bug's Life "1 star" for example, and 3,284 who gave Shrek "1 star." And so forth. Movies need to be rated with some perspective on similar movies.

Mars Needs Moms has some redeeming values. Not nearly as witty as Tangled or Shrek, but easier to understand and more enjoyable than Rango, which seemed to bore my two boys (4 and 7) whereas Mars Needs Moms entertained them. In all fairness, Rango was intended for slightly older children than mine, but I'm a pretty old child myself, with a lot more filmmaking, movie-going, and storytelling experience than the average IMDb reviewer, and I didn't find Rango nearly as brilliant as Johnny Depp's ground-worshipers claim.

My advice to you, if you haven't seen Mars Needs Moms, is ask your kid if he or she is interested, and if so, take them. Forget about what you hear about it on IMDb boards, it's likely tainted.