Culture

Directed by Simon Wells, (2.5/5).
Mars is named after the Roman god of war and is often described as the "Red Planet" due to the iron oxide in its surface. A mother is a woman who has given birth to or raised a child in the role of a parent. Mars Needs Moms is a 3D computer-animated film about a 9-year old boy who attempts to save his mother when she gets abducted by Martians. Together, these facts produce the essence of a box-office bomb.

 
Initially the film's audience witnesses scenes on both Mars and Earth, but it's not the plot we focus on, it’s the motion-capture animation. This animation is the result of actors physically and verbally acting out scenes while computers record their movements and voice, and then later animation is applied. What could be viewed as a current and innovative animation technique can very quickly become as creepy as a ranch called Neverland. The animated faces look realistic but they just miss out on looking entirely human, creating a slight revulsion in viewers as it crosses the “uncanny valley”. The “valley” mentioned is a dip in a proposed graph of the positivity of human reaction as a function of a robot's life likeness. Psychologically speaking, it's interesting but when viewers want to passively watch a Disney animated film they don’t want to be subconsciously creeped.

 
In terms of actual film content, a feminist reading of it would be wild. The extreme feminist's Utopian world on Mars is a systematic, female society under dictatorship. The male Martians are banished underground to live in a life of colour, dancing and bringing up male babies. Babies are grown in the ground. Earth, and in particular America, is seen as the place where ideal mothers live. The final focus is on the conventions and necessity of family. Overall, WTF is this meant to reflect about the ideals of Western society?

 
Mars Needs Moms travels the extraterrestrial valley of aesthetic creepiness, lack of imagination and conflicting feminist ideals. Worst of all is that it cost $150 million to make us appreciate our moms. We don't even have “moms” in New Zealand, we have “mums”. Racist.