Mars Needs Moms

Mars Needs Moms is at first glance par for the course: a kids' sci-fantasy adventure movie with a telegraphed moral, a bouncy score, and a whole ton of CGI. Protagonist Milo (Seth Dusky) is in the business of providing lighthearted Calvin-and-Hobbes mischief for his overworked mother (Joan Cusack), until late one night she is kidnapped by Martians. Sneaking aboard the ship, Milo has a wild and wooly adventure on Mars, where he meets all manner of vivid (visually, at least) characters and gets in several scrapes with the totalitarian Martian government before rescuing his mom and returning home with a new and deserved appreciation of her.

There's one small snag in this otherwise pat synopsis: totalitarian Martian government. You see, the Mars of Mars Needs Moms is a planet ruled by women, where the traditional family unit has been abolished and men are cast down at birth into a subterranean garbage heap. Without the men, the women cannot nurture their babies (really) and instead build nanny-bots, programmed with the dismantled consciousnesses of (groan) abducted “Earth moms”. So, the premise: Mars Needs Moms. Can you spot the really clever double entendre in the title yet?

Mars Needs Moms is a very odd movie. Perhaps the oddest thing about it is that it's deeply, deeply usual: we suffer through some not-quite-there CGI, which occasionally looks very realistic but also occasionally looks like a gaggle of depraved cartoon characters sewn into human skin. We coo at the sparkly vistas and chuckle at the comic relief, which is actually very aptly provided by interplanetary lost boy Gribble (Dan Fogler), and we groan at the time-lost Who Let the Dogs Out joke (yes, really) that somehow finds its way into every other children's movie. It's entirely tolerable, even fun.

Peel back the surface, though, and Mars Needs Moms is a barefaced sop to conservative family values with an unsettlingly anti-feminist message. We get all kinds of look-into-the-camera moral delivery from Milo (“Maybe if they had a mom and a dad they wouldn't need to kidnap people to program their robots!”) and later we're shown an ancient mural of a heterogenous Martian couple holding a baby, which Martian rebel Ki (Elisabeth Harnois) uses as “proof” that the current regime must be overthrown and replaced with good old ineffable tradition. Men being dehumanised and excluded from society plays to fallacious fears of female empowerment “gone too far”, and the movie's main villain, the Supervisor (Mindy Sterling) is the very picture of the mean ol' matriarch - crabbed, crabby and joyless, and of course the more evil for being old and ugly (“Mars needs botox!” quips Milo on seeing her, in a charming display of proto-patriarchy).

All in all, not a terrible movie, but one with an insidiously regressive ethos - all the more worrying when it's targeted at kids. Watch Mars Needs Moms only if you're willing to deflect hostile brain rays in exchange for CGI and cheap schmaltz.

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