On the list of things wrong with this movie, the logical place to start would be the title. It sounds like a porno. Sure, it’s not as bad as “Deep Impact,” “Black Snake Moan,” “Three Men and a Little Lady” or, my personal favorite, “The Midnight Meat Train,” but it is a really crappy title nonetheless. Apparently, it is a reference to some ’60s B movie, which is totally logical when your target audience was born post-2000. I mean, what kid today hasn’t seen “Zaat”?
Then there the Martians who look like something out of a goddamn nightmare — or current-day Eddie Van Halen. When I was a kid, the A/C unit from “The Brave Little Toaster” used to scare the hell out of me. That was an inanimate object. If I had seen that Martian with his creepy “I’ve got a cellar full of corpses” look going on, I’d probably be in therapy right now.
Finally, Robert Zemeckis’s animation studio simply sucks. As much as I hated “Avatar,” at least the Na’vi didn’t look like soulless zombies (they instead were 7-foot sexualized cats). I understand that suspension of disbelief is critical for the majority of films dealing with unrealistic subject matter, but something about plastic, rape-faced aliens just doesn’t sit right with me, or the rest of America apparently. Bad special effects and stupid, nonsensical scenes can actually be really fun when it seems like the filmmakers actually tried. But “Mars Needs Moms” just feels like a lazy, half-assed effort from everyone involved.
