ImageMovers, Walt Disney Productions
Seth Green, Dan Fogler, Joan Cusack, Elisabeth Harnois, Mindy Sterling, Kevin Cahoon, Tom Everett Scott, Jacquie Barnbrook
Milo (Seth Green) is a typical boy. He’s adept at getting in trouble, and after tormenting his sister, then refusing to eat Broccoli (even feeding it to the dog) his mom has had it with him. In the middle of a tantrum Milo says his life would be much better without his Mom. Little does he know the Martians are watching and they believe him and kidnap his mom to take her to Mars to extract her “momness” from her to program their robots which care for the martian babies. Milo has to head for Mars to try to save his mother.
This film uses the motion capture system that Disney used for A Christmas Carol a while back. The actors act the entire movie wearing a bunch of wires and straps to get all the movements (even subtle things like eyebrow and mouth movements) and feed it to the computer. It’s a very expensive process, and drives up the cost of the film. The problem is that this is based on a book, but it must not be a very good book. The film has about as much heart as a Saturday morning cartoon. It was quite a bomb in the box office and had a chilling effect on the Disney Animation Department. Several major projects were cancelled after this one tanked. It’s too bad because I was really looking forward to this film. I was anxious to watch it in 3D in the theater as I was pretty high on the 3D effects. Fortunately I wasn’t able to fit this one into my schedule and didn’t blow $18.00 on this in a 3D theater. I was really disappointed. Even after it tanked it the theater, I figured I’d probably still like it, but I didn’t.
The story is extremely predictable and really overused. Milo is really annoying and is a bit of a brat. The other characters are also not much fun. Ki (Elisabeth Harnois) is a Martian girl who is probably the most interesting of the lot. She’s a pretty good character, but Gribble (Dan Fogler) who is supposed to be the “Han Solo” here is a big baby loser much like the Captain on “Wall-E” There wasn’t much to keep my interest, and the motion capture technology is kind of creepy, to say the least. I would much rather have a flat hand drawn film with a great story (Like Lilo and Stitch or the new Winnie the Pooh) than a big budget 3D CGI film like this with no story. It just didn’t have anything to keep my interest. Truly one of the old Marvin the Martian cartoons with Bugs Bunny would have been much more interesting than this movie.
Instead of killing off the Animation Department and just giving everything to Pixar, Disney needs to go back to looking for really good stories and keep trying. There must be some good ones out there. Surely they haven’t scraped the bottom of the barrel yet. Surely there’s something original out there crying to be made. I hope so.
EdG – EdsReview Dot Com – A Movie Review Blog
