• Starring: Dan Fogler, Joan Cusack, Seth Green
  • Summary: Take out the trash, eat your broccoli—who needs moms, anyway? Nine-year-old Milo finds out just how much he needs his mom when she's nabbed by Martians who plan to steal her mom-ness for their own young. Produced by the team behind "Disney's A Christmas Carol" and "The Polar Express," "Mars Needs Moms" showcases Milo's quest to save his mom—a wild adventure in Disney Digital 3D™ and IMAX® 3D that involves stowing away on a spaceship, navigating an elaborate, multi-level planet and taking on the alien nation and their leader. With the help of a tech-savvy, underground earthman named Gribble and a rebel Martian girl called Ki, Milo just might find his way back to his mom—in more ways than one. Based on the book by Berkeley Breathed.(Walt Disney Pictures) Expand
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 8 out of 22
  2. Negative: 3 out of 22
  1. Reviewed by: Lisa Schwarzbaum
    Mar 9, 2011
    91
    The movie is also visually magnificent - modestly so. Plus, it's half the length of "Avatar."
  2. Reviewed by: Joe Neumaier
    Mar 10, 2011
    60
    While not every family film can plant a flag here, the happily offbeat Mars Needs Moms turns out to be a charming, subversive, minor addition to the club.
  3. Reviewed by: Michael Phillips
    Mar 10, 2011
    38
    On the whole, I'd rather be on Pluto, which isn't even a planet.

See all 22 Critic Reviews

Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 8 out of 14
  2. Negative: 5 out of 14
  1. This was a great family movie. Very entertaining and heart warming for kids and parents alike. My daughter wants to live on the Moon and travel to Mars. So this was great fun. Also the 3D digital art work was fantastic. It seemd as if you were there with Milo. I am going to go see it again and also buy the new DVD. Thanks Disney and IMD! Expand
    • 2 of 3 users said yes
  2. 5
    This review contains spoilers, click expand to view. No broccoli, no TV. That's the edict handed down from a mother to her son, so the motion capture boy tries to fool his motion capture mom by feeding the offending vegetable to the motion capture cat. The ruse works, until the cat barfs, and Milo(Seth Green) is sent to bed without his zombie fix. Feeling burned, Milo wishes that he never had a mom, making the woman who sounds suspiciously like Joan Cusack cry, and before he can take it back, she becomes the victim of an alien abduction, in a style that strongly recalls "Close Encounters of the Third Kind". In the 1977 Steven Spielberg film, the moviegoer feels the anguish of being left behind as Melinda Dillon watches the otherworldly aircraft whisk her baby away beyond the lit-up sky to heaven knows where. "Mars Needs Moms" is not quite so harsh(if it was, you'd have a theater full of traumatized little kids), since Milo sneaks on board the departing spaceship. True, Milo's mother may be lobotomized by a faintly Asian-sounding alien who looks a little like E.T.(MIndy Sterling), but "Mars Needs Moms" makes sure that the boy has some fun on this dystopian planet, where girls are more prized than boys. With mother and son always being relatively close together, there's not much in the way of drama, as it would've had Milo needed to find his own passage to the red planet. The boy never realizes the full extent of regret for uttering those hurtful words against his mom because he's too cognizant of her whereabouts. The mission, as a result, doesn't have a whole lot of urgency to it, and yet, we do see what could happen to the captured woman(through another character's mother) which is considerably more frightening than anything in "Bambi". Expand
    • 0 of 0 users said yes
  3. What is happening to Disney? I’m convinced Disney’s 21st century brain trust is without offspring. My kids were scared to death and crying in sorrow. Very few laughs! Walt is surely rolling over in his grave. Expand
    • 3 of 3 users said yes

See all 14 User Reviews

Trailers