Review of Mars Needs Moms (2011) by Shiira — 22 Mar 2011

No broccoli, no TV. That's the edict handed down from a mother to her son, so the motion capture boy tries to fool his motion capture mom by feeding the offending vegetable to the motion capture cat. The ruse works, until the cat barfs, and Milo(Seth Green) is sent to bed without his zombie fix.

Feeling burned, Milo wishes that he never had a mom, making the woman who sounds suspiciously like Joan Cusack cry, and before he can take it back, she becomes the victim of an alien abduction, in a style that strongly recalls "Close Encounters of the Third Kind".

In the 1977 Steven Spielberg film, the moviegoer feels the anguish of being left behind as Melinda Dillon watches the otherworldly aircraft whisk her baby away beyond the lit-up sky to heaven knows where.

"Mars Needs Moms" is not quite so harsh(if it was, you'd have a theater full of traumatized little kids), since Milo sneaks on board the departing spaceship. True, Milo's mother may be lobotomized by a faintly Asian-sounding alien who looks a little like E.

T.(MIndy Sterling), but "Mars Needs Moms" makes sure that the boy has some fun on this dystopian planet, where girls are more prized than boys. With mother and son always being relatively close together, there's not much in the way of drama, as it would've had Milo needed to find his own passage to the red planet.

The boy never realizes the full extent of regret for uttering those hurtful words against his mom because he's too cognizant of her whereabouts. The mission, as a result, doesn't have a whole lot of urgency to it, and yet, we do see what could happen to the captured woman(through another character's mother) which is considerably more frightening than anything in "Bambi".