Mars Needs Moms

Simon Wells

Those Martians are such a nefarious bunch. They cannot take care of their own little tykes so they abduct Milo’s mom (Joan Cusack) in order to extract her superior child-rearing ability to download into nannybots.

It is up to nine-year-old Milo (Seth Green) to save her, with some help from the kooky tech-savvy human sidekick Gribble (Dan Fogler) and the rebellious Martian girl Ki (Elisabeth Harnois), whose limited knowledge of English comes from a TV show about hippies.

The film is based on the book by Berkely Breathed, who is best known for his sardonic Bloom County comic strip. And it is clearly aimed at the pre-teen set with its young hero and somewhat heavy-handed message about being nice to your mother.

But there are some rather odd touches to the story. The villain of the piece is an ancient and testy female Martian known as the Supervisor (Mindy Sterling), who looks like Steven Spielberg’s E.T. (1982) with a bad wig. Somehow, she has managed to impose matriarchal control and banished the men, literally, to the garbage heap.

Too bad the film is not interested in this part of the tale. Instead, the focus is on the rescue mission adventure yarn which is passably engaging, if not exactly out of this world.

Sterling also provides the funniest moment of the film as she barks away in “Martian” as the credits roll.

(ST)