My World of Flops Mars Needs Better Movies Case File #186 Mars Needs Moms (2011)
With the notable exception of the two years I worked for The Dissolve, I have consistently looked at Wikipedia’s list of the all-time biggest box-office disasters while looking for movies to write about for My World of Flops over the past decade, noted Mars Needs Mom’s place high in the pantheon of all-time stinkers and made a conscious effort not to write about it.
Mars Needs Moms cost a staggering one hundred fifty million dollars to make and grossed under forty million dollars at the international box-office. It did so badly that Disney got cold feet and decided to change the name of John Carter From Mars to John Carter under the dubious logic that Mars From Mars flopped on a historic level because audiences just plain hated movies that took place on Mars and not because it’s a 150 million dollar Dan Fogler vehicle that ultimately takes place not on Mars or on Earth but in the creepiest, most nightmarish depths of the uncanny valley.
Why has it taken so long for me to write about one of the biggest flops ever for a column devoted to re-accessing the most massive failures in film history? I suppose because from the outside at least Mars Needs Moms looks like a singularly unpromising combination of bland and boring.
Yet when I visited Disney+ this morning looking for something funky and weird to write about for Wild Disney Animation Month and Mars Needs Mars popped up I realized that the CGI boondoggle perfectly fits the criteria of both this month’s theme and My World of Flops.
I’m glad I subjected myself to the waking nightmare that is Mars Needs Moms not because it is good. It is not. Oh boy is it ever extremely not good! I can’t say it’s terribly engaging either but if I may heap the faintest of praise upon it, at least it’s not bland.
In the grand tradition of My World of Flops, Mars Needs Mom makes a lot of choices that are as bold as they are insane and wrong. These includes prominently billing Seth Green as the star of the movie, to the point where his name is first in the credits and he appears in end-credit outtakes documenting the film’s motion-capture-based approach to CGI animation THEN REMOVING HIS VOICE FROM THE FILM ENTIRELY when it perhaps unsurprisingly turned out that the thirty-seven year old actor sounded a little too old to convincingly portray a nine year old boy.
Got a staring problem, kid?
The curious choices extend to sharing Pixar’s curious conviction that the most important thing about making movies that children will love involves making sure that the women have big, juicy, curvaceous posteriors, real CGI badonkadonks.
Mars Needs Moms relieved Green of his lead voice role late in the game yet disastrously gave free reign to the obnoxious, overbearing and insufferable improvisational comedy stylings of Dan Fogler, who Hollywood has been trying to cram down the moviegoing public’s throat unsuccessfully for a decade and a half now.
Hollywood tried to make Fogler happen as the comedy sidekick in the unwatchable Dane Cook vehicle Good Luck Chuck. We politely said, “No thank you.” Then Balls of Fury tried to turn him into a leading man and we collectively passed, and passed hard.
By the time Fanboys rolled around it was beginning to feel like there was a sinister conspiracy afoot to make Dan Fogler a star that would not stop until it succeeded in violent defiance of God’s will and the wishes of the moviegoing public.
Here’s the thing. We do not want Dan Fogler in supporting roles. We do not want Dan Fogler filling in plot holes. We do not want Dan Fogler stealing scenes. We do not Dan Fogler acting on a green screen. We do not want Dan Fogler here or there. We do not want to see Dan Fogler anywhere.
Sure, Fogler finally experienced some cinematic success as part of the ensemble for the Fantastic Beasts movies but they’re so tone-deaf and wrong that I wouldn’t be surprised if they happily announced that they had just lined up Bill Cosby, Woody Allen and Roman Polanski for cameos in the next installment.
I like to think of Fogler as Jack Wack or Josh Sad, because he’s EXACTLY like Black and Gad except that he destroys everything that he touches. The more reliant a film is on Fogler’s shtick, the more hopelessly fucked it is.
Mars Needs Mom treats Fogler like he’s John Belushi in Animal House and everything that comes out of that magical mouth of his is pure comic gold. Needless to say, Mars Needs Moms is fucked from the get-go.
We open on Earth, where nine-year-old Milo disobeys his mother (Joan Cusack) in an appropriately generic fashion by feeding broccoli to the dog and then jumping on his bed.
In a fit of anger, Milo tells his mother that he would be better off without her. It then falls upon the universe to teach Milo the lessons that moms are important and the nuclear family is good.
That’s a message American audiences require about as much as they need to be lectured that puppies are cute, Mr. Rogers was nice, you must breathe if you don’t want to die, Marvin Gaye had a nice voice and Steve McQueen was cool.
The film immediately sets about making Milo regret his words by having a race of martians who live under the surface of the planet kidnap his mother so that her mental programming can be used to program a nanny-bot that will raise Martian children.
Milo races to save his mother from interplanetary doom and ends up in a different part of the space ship where he eventually encounters George "Gribble" Ribble (Fogler), an emotionally stunted man-child who has been marinating in eternal adolescence as a TV and video-games-addicted slob after his own mother was taken by Martians and killed.
This is, as you might imagine, way too heavy for a children’s film but then Mars Needs Moms sometimes resembles Brazil in the unrelentingly grim nature of its dystopian world-building.
Aw! Look at this disgusting little chap!
In Mars Needs Moms, Martian women are cold and dispassionate and have no interest in raising children and consequently are pawns for evil while the men are child-like and, if anything, overly playful and affectionate, and are coded problematically as both Rastafarians and ape-like creatures, not unlike the similarly muddled Arthur and the Invisibles.
There is a key exception, however, in the form of Ki, a sexy hippie Martian Pixie Dream Girl with dreads and a bodacious behind whose entire personality and worldview are taken from an earth sitcom about lovable hippies.
Ki consequently talks like a Laugh In cast-member and falls instantly in love with Gribble’s inter-planetary incel because he blushes when he’s around her because he’s so nervous, which she finds absolutely adorable.
Gribble similarly takes his entire personality from pop culture, although in his case that entails a wide variety of television, toys and video games, not just a single sitcom. That consequently makes him Ready Player One in sentient form, which is the harshest criticism possible.
It’s not an encouraging sign that when the Martians succeed in capturing Gribble I not only didn’t want him to be rescued: I wanted him to die in a particularly ugly, painful fashion, possibly after weeks, or even years of brutal, unrelenting torture. I’m not saying he’s not likable or sympathetic but I wanted him to suffer the torments of the damned for all of eternity.
I did not enjoy Fogler’s performance, is what I’m trying to say, nor did I appreciate the way that it absolutely dominates the movie. Fogler saw a giant vacuum at the center of the film, where heart, humor and humanity are supposed to be and filled it with manic nonsense and abrasive shtick.
Mars Needs Moms is an astonishingly bad movie that seems to have next to nothing to do with the beloved Berkley Breathed children’s book that inspired it beyond its title.
I was not at all surprised to learn that Robert Zemeckis produced Mars Needs Mom because he ironically seems to have learned the wrong lesson from Who Framed Roger Rabbit’s extraordinary success more than anyone.
Zemeckis has spent the decades since that masterpiece’s release refining increasingly complicated, sophisticated ways of combining live-action and computer animation without realizing that it doesn’t matter how amazing a movie is from a technological perspective if it utterly fails to engage audiences on an emotional level.
Failure, Fiasco or Secret Success: Fiasco
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