Mars Needs Moms

After his caring mother (Joan Cusack) is abducted in her sleep and transported into outer space to teach nanny-robots how to discipline kids, 9-year-old Milo (Seth Green) is determined to get her back from the malicious Martian Supervisor (Mindy Sterling) who plans to drain his mom's brain. Stowing away on a spaceship, Milo befriends Gribble (Dan Fogler), a tech-savvy, underground Earthman, and Ki (Elisabeth Harnois), a rebellious Martian girl who speaks hippie-style English that she picked up from watching '60s TV shows and spreads her own brand of flower-power graffiti. Utilizing the motion-capture technology that turns the actors into animated characters (such as in Robert Zemeckis' The Polar Express), Simon Wells' (great-grandson of H.G. Wells) Mars Needs Moms is based on the children's book by Pulitzer Prize–winning cartoonist Berkeley Breathed. Unfortunately, the adapted story has been simplified, stripped of its charm, and omits key explanatory information about Mars' multilevel matriarchal society, where all newly hatched males are cast into underground dumps, leaving the sprouting female infants to be raised by robots. An optional purchase. [Note: DVD/Blu-ray extras include a “Fun with Seth” featurette with star Seth Green (3 min.), “Martian 101” language lessons (3 min.), and trailers. Exclusive to the Blu-ray release is a “Life On Mars” picture-in-picture viewing mode that features the actors during their motion-capture sessions with audio commentary (by director Simon Wells, Green and costar Dan Fogler), deleted scenes with an extended opening (29 min.), and a bonus DVD copy of the film. Bottom line: a decent extras package for a disappointing film.] (S. Granger)