Planet Disney currently finds itself riding a pretty decent wave of momentum, thanks mostly in part to IP acquisitions of Star Wars and Marvel respectfully, but recent original production Encanto has also been, from what I can tell, pretty well received and has been a big success for the brand. I wouldn't know... I haven't watched it yet... but it's hard to imagine the House of Mouse as anything other than a monumental leviathan of cinema nowadays, and if the current upward trend sustains itself, the future of the Disney brand looks incredibly positive indeed, provided they stop churning out sub-par Star Wars content... Personal opinions aside, it hasn't always been green grass and rosey uh... roses... in the Disney garden and despite producing and releasing some absolute legendary movies, there has been a fair old handful of complete and total failures. None more spectacular so than 2011's Mars Needs Moms.
I actually stumbled on
an article on Movieweb that tells the story better than I ever could, but the TL,DR is that it cost something painfully eyewateringly close to like $150 Million (that's $150,000,000 or alot of money to you and me) to make and returned a paltry $39 Million ($39,000,000 or alot of money to you and me) in return representing a net loss of nearly 74%... probably. I don't know how tax works in the movie industry. In any event it cost Disney
alot of money and finds itself with the notorious honour of being labelled a "Box Office Bomb". But the question we always ask here during Disney Week, when we are not looking at Disney Channel Original stuff that is, is: Why. Why did this fail so epically spectacularly? Or why did this little known movie slide into relative obscurity. And there is only ever one way to really find out: you have to watch it for yourself!
Milo (Seth Green, voiced by Seth Dusky) struggles to sleep after being a tiny jerk to his mum over not eating his broccoli, and after discussing it with the cat, decides to go and apologise to her only to witness her alien abduction by Martians from, well, Mars. Hitching a ride on their spacecraft, Milo passes out and, waking up inside some weird pod thing, and suddenly discovers that he is very much not welcome as some unfriendly Martians try and blast him to chunks. With the assistance of Gribble (Dan Fogler), Milo escapes down a rubbish chute where he meets Gribble in person, now a fully grown man, but presumably also a child left behind on Mars, and Milo learns that the Martians plan to steal his mums memories in order to program their own 'nanny-bots' to raise their offspring. Refusing to let that happen, Milo convinces Gribble to help him save his mum, with Gribble agreeing although maintaining an ulterior motive that once Milo realises how dangerous it is, he will have no choice but to stay with Gribble and be his play-pal... and when Milo gets almost immediately captured by The Supervisor (Mindy Sterling) and her Martian forces, Gribble's location is given away and despite Gribble helping Milo to get away, he too is captured. Milo, meanwhile, whilst hiding from the nasty Martians, is discovered by a friendly one; a girl named Ki (Elisabeth Harnois) a rebel, obsessed with Earth hippy culture, who has been making everyone very angry by graffiti tagging colourbursts everywhere... Realising that Gribble might be in trouble, Milo rushes back to the wasteland where he discovers Gribble's old base has been destroyed, but amongst the wreckage he finds an old sweater that reveals Gribble's name to George Ribble, and he finds Two Cat - Gribble's pet robot who shows Milo that Gribble has been taken to the firing squad... rushing to the scene Milo is just able to save Gribble at the absolute last second, and thanks to an intervention from an undercover Ki, the pair are able to escape to the wasteland, with Two Cat rescuing Ki at the same time. However their relief is short-lived as, no soon as Milo and Gribble make it to the wasteland, they are immediately pursued by the Martians and have to escape. Landing in some, crazy cave with lots of glowing things Gribble tells the story of how he came to be on Mars; following the Martians who also abducted his mum, and how he wasn't able to save her in time, and as he pledges to help Milo save his mum, they are interrupted by Ki and Two Cat arriving with Ki offering to the help the pair get to the surface. Along the way Gribble accidentally reveals an old mural of a Martian family, coming as a shock to Ki who understood that Martians were only ever raised by nanny-bots and she has no concept of love or family... Having made their way to the surface, Ki explains to Milo and Gribble that they need to get outdoors to find the rocketship back to Earth and the pod where Milo's mum is being held. Along the way Gribble spots his Martian pal; Wingnut being held prisoner and after releasing him, the trio learn that any male Martian children are discarded to the wasteland, and only the females are kept to serve as guards. After tricking their way past the rocket's guards, Milo makes it to the planets surface whilst Ki and Gribble begin to take control of the rocket, but when Milo falls into a crevasse and isn't able to escape he has to be saved by Gribble, who draws the attention of the Supervisor and the rest of the Martians as they scramble to stop Milo from releasing his mum. Meanwhile, as Gribble helps to stop the Martians rushing onto the surface, Ki accidentally activates the launch system for the rocket, as Milo battles with the pod restraints to free his mum, just as it seems all hope is lost, Wingnut and the male Martians spring from the rubbish chute, disrupting the army, and freeing all the female hatchlings from the Nannybots. Meanwhile, Milo is just able to free his mum in time, but has less than a minute to get to the rocket with his dazed and sleepy mother before it blasts off! Managing to bring her too, despite being in a state of panic, Milo and his mum begin to make their way to the ship, only for the Supervisor to burst through the door and aim a shot at Milo until she is tackled to the ground by Gribble, the shot however causing Milo to trip and shatter his helmet. As the rocket takes off in the background, Milo's mum removes her helmet, using it to save Milo but in the process causing her to pass out from lack of oxygen and everything looks very sad until Gribble remembers the old helmet he was going to use to save his own mum is still buried in the desert, and rushing to grab it he uses it to save Milo's mum and bring her back to life. And just in time as Ki returns, pretty unsteadily guiding the rocket, landing on the surface ready to pick Milo and his mum up. But before they can get to the rocket The Supervisor springs up from underneath the sand and screams out for the other guards to arrest them all. But when Ki shows the rest of the Martians the mural in the underground, they realise that all this time they have been raised the wrong way, and after having a change of heart, arrest the Supervisor and let Milo and Ki go free. Returning to Earth, Ki and Gribble drop Milo and his mum back off as Gribble pledges to return to Mars with Ki and help turn things around.
I have been crazy busy at work since last weekend, bleeding into this week thanks to several tropical storms hitting the country and as a result I am feeling the tiredness pretty badly this evening and am maybe a little bit emotionally fragile as a result, but damn this movies last 15 minutes really pulled at the heartstrings! I mean, Disney does it in - I think - nearly every movie and it's a tried and tested formula, but every one of their movies is an emotional rollercoaster - and they do it well, but damn I was feeling it with this one!
There was a lot of things actually that this movie did and did well. But before we get too deep into it I think we have to address the art style. The principal reason this movie failed has been attributed to the motion capture CGI production, one of only 2 films ImageMovers Digital worked on before they were dissolved, and I am appreciating the criticisms that I read before going in. The movie does look 'hyperrealistic', and at times almost too much so, but throughout this entire film, I kept thinking about how similar it looks to the modern CGI productions of today, in particular the upcoming Lightyear movie, which I'm pretty excited about, not gonna lie. And I think, to a degree, maybe it was way before it's time. I think if this dropped say, this year or a few years prior, the whole hyperealistic CGI stuff would have probably been praised as innovative and inventive rather than criticised like it was at the time. I mean, sure, the Martian characters were a bit odd looking, maybe too much so for the time, but in retrospect they aren't that creepy and unsettling? I actually found Ki's character really endearing? The TL,DR; is that I'm coming away from this with a genuine feeling that the criticism is a bit unfounded. Perhaps y'all weren't ready for it in 2011?
Aside from the art style, and owing to the fact that the movie is 100% mocap CGI, you have a whole wealth of creative licence to explore and manipulate and I felt like this movie did a pretty good job with that. The set pieces; the wasteland, the caves, the Martian base are all really creatively designed and the Martian characters, although maybe a bit unsettling at first, were humanoid enough so as to not be too alienating, no pun intended. Also with the movie being all computerised, you have the freedom to mould things as you like, and the movie took full advantage of this freedom with some really impressive cinematography and scene framing used to keep the movie visually impressive and interesting.
As aforementioned the movie was still only a CGI though, and motion capture was used to uh... flesh out the characters, for want of a better way of putting it, so despite being technically animated, there still had to be a degree of acting going into this and I don't know how much of it was animated or genuine body language, but the stand out for me was Dan Fogler as Gribble, who did a really great job of being the simple minded stooge and at times comic relief. Whilst I felt Elisabeth Harnois character Ki was really endearing, and despite Gribble not being the lead, he really carried the film and he could have easily strayed into the annoying sidekick territory but he perfectly tread that line of providing the comedy support whilst being the goofy sidekick.
And plot wise, despite taking the path most travelled with the storyline development and despite being very much a Disney formulaic movie, I felt it was at least interesting enough that I found myself invested by what was going on. There was few times I was so into the movie that I forgot to screenshot moments and had to go back! It's very much a child in peril kind of kids drama, with all the emotional stuff (and Christ it's layered on thick at the end) that goes with it, but it's become almost expected from Disney movies by this point and they almost always have that moralistic tale that teaches kids something by the end of it. I guess it depends on your stance as to whether not all of the above is generally a good thing, or whether you feel Disney movies have become stale and too formulaic and predictable, but I don't think it's an approach Disney intend to alter any time soon and their recent movies all follow the same trend, so hey, it's here to stay.
Other than that the movie was technically accurate in all other places, and to be honest it probably wasn't the greatest Disney movie ever, but nor would I consider it a bad movie. Maybe it was a victim of poor timing? Maybe the CGI was unduly criticised? I read comparisons with Avatar were made by some critics which I think is frankly unfair when they have 2 completely different target audiences. But maybe this movie was just a little too ambitious for it's time. Disney felt like this was really the cutting edge, the next level in animated movies, and to a degree they may have been on to something, but I honestly don't feel the cinema going public were quite ready for it yet, and I don't know if they still are. I really enjoyed 2019's Detective Pikachu, although I'm a big Pokémon fan so slightly biased, but even that got criticised in some circles for it's CGI art style. Maybe the hyper-realistic thing is just not what people want from their animated movies? I think if it was utilized in more cult, underground cinema productions with a more adult edge it would have been pioneered as groundbreaking and next-level, but here with all the attention it received it was maybe over-analysed and unfairly so.
This was not a bad movie though, far from it. It was enjoyable, interesting and immersive. I found it genuinely interesting to watch, yeah ok perhaps, at times, out of morbid curiosity, but I was invested in the storyline and I honestly enjoyed it. I would absolutely watch this again and not be afraid to recommend it. Unfortunately it will never shake that "Box Office Bomb" label and that will forever be it's legacy, but I think in time, maybe history will be much more kinder to it, and to ImageMovers Digital, maybe in 2011 we just weren't ready for it? Because I certainly feel attitudes would be different if it was released now. A strong 3 out of 5.
