The great box office disaster of the year makes it to New Zealand, and it's … not that bad.
Mars Needs Moms
Mars Needs Moms is one of the more important movies of 2011, because pretty much no one seems to want to see it. Its production budget was a reported US $150 million. It opened in America something over a month ago, and as I write this its domestic box office take is a little above US$20 million. These are end-of-days numbers. The people who greenlit this movie are now looking to the wider world for a career-saving miracle. Kiwis, we could be part of that miracle. Stand with me! Disney execs need us!
The easy follow-on sentence after that bit of sarcasm would be this: “Disney execs need us to help this movie bomb, so they can avoid ever making something like it again.” That’s roughly the critical response the film’s been getting in the States. I can’t begin to understand why. Well, no, I can; it just seems a bit wrong-headed. Mars Needs Moms is reactionary, yes. It’s full of clear errors of tone, sure. The 3D animation is based on co-producer Robert Zemeckis’s famously discomforting performance capture system, giving the human characters corpse-like faces whose ability to register emotion feels subliminally worrying.
But the film is nowhere near the worst I’ve seen in years; it isn’t even the worst I’ve seen this week. It’s actually quite charming in places. Once it got over its awkward set-up scenes and into the swing of its story, it had me and the large child audience I watched it with enjoying ourselves well enough.
Briefly, the story: boy is mean to his mother. Martians abduct mother. Boy sets out to rescue mother. Adult son of a previously abducted mother hinders boy, helps boy, bonds with boy. Cute Martian woman takes shine to son of previously abducted mother. There are fine action sequences, and the animation of everything that isn’t human, which fortunately is rather a lot, is impressive.
The problems: those human faces. Ick. The errors of tone: it gets a bit scary for very smalls, and way, way too mawkish for older kids. The film is full of silly mistakes like this: a mother picking up her son and hugging him in a moment of high emotion works with most age groups, if the high emotion rings true. Change nothing else, but add this line of dialogue – “Oh Milo, my love” – and you have a problem it takes a very good voice actor to solve. It wasn’t solved here.
The reactionary subtext: here, I think, is the nubbin of the critical beat-up. The film’s villain looks an awful lot like being feminism. It’s personified in a crone-ruler whose entire life-goal is to free Martian women from the need to care for their children, so they can get on with … well, the film doesn’t specify, but their careers, presumably.
Presumably, that is, if you’re an adult. And to an adult, a throw-away joke near the end, where a Martian infant urinates in the crone-ruler’s face, is easily read as a vicious and appalling piece of symbolism. Take that, career woman. But to a child, the conceptual machinery which sets up the story doesn’t much impinge on the important part of it, which is: boy has adventure, makes friends, saves mother; nasty person who kidnapped mother has amusingly gross comeuppance.
So why did this film bomb so remarkably in America? Worse ones do better all the time. Mainstream American parents perhaps get less practice than the rest of us at dealing with children’s films that strike them as reactionary; did the shock amplify their perception of the film’s other flaws? I have no better theory close to hand. Meanwhile, for New Zealand parents assessing this as a school holiday option – look, it’s not great. But it’s not terrible either. I’d give it a C, or, on a wet day with the right child, a B minus. And since it may well be the film that finally kills off Zemeckis’s performance capture, if you’re curious to see those zombie faces on the big screen – this could be your last chance.
MARS NEEDS MOMS by Simon Wells, showing now, click here for sessions and times.