True fact: I've never seen an episode of Star Trek, or any of the original franchise's spin-offs onto screens large and small. And yet even I am aware of the episode where Spock's brain is stolen and spirited off to a planet populated solely by vindictive and yet vaguely aroused women.
That I pulled up a memory of something I know only by proxy while watching Mars Needs Moms, Disney's vivid 3-D tour of an insolent son's somnambulant stress center, is a symptom, I think, of just how strange it is. One tries to make sense of it this way and that -- locate it via referential coordinates, call Freud in for a consult -- and then leaves half admiring its outré visions of maternal care and coldness, half wishing its metaphorical swagger had either busted the story open (cf. A.I.) or gotten out of its way (à la Where the Wild Things Are).
The rundown: Milo (Seth Green) is a total pill. His mom (Joan Cusack) has run out of nerves for him to work, so when he lashes out at her after being sent to his room for a broccoli-related offense, she dissolves into tears and heads to bed. (Dad is stuck in parts unknown on a business trip.) Having been identified by the ruthless matriarchal society running Mars as a "good mother," Milo's mom is kidnapped during the night; every few years, when baby Martians sprout from the ground, a human is sought and her maternal instincts are sucked from her brain. That data is then used to program the mom-bots that the Martians use to raise their kids -- the female Martians have long ago lost the urge themselves, and in fact literally throw male babies in the garbage, where they are raised amid trash heaps by the stupid, loving dudes of the species.
Run by a scary crone who looks like E.T. on aggressive estrogen therapy, the Martians resemble Metropolis fembots with tapered, equine legs and an astronomical waist-to-hip ratio. They speak a screechy gibberish and seem to be in constant, lockstep preparation for an intergalactic tribute to the Mass Games. Milo hops aboard the spaceship just as it's lifting off from his backyard, and spends the rest of the film trying to save his mom -- who is hidden from sight for the next 80 minutes -- from her fate as a host for the oxytocin-deprived.
Milo quickly meets Gribble (Dan Fogler), another human who's been stranded on Mars since a similar mission killed his mom. Ensconced in the garbage-y underground with the rest of the males, Gribble is a techno-savant kid in the body of a big, wobbly-chinned man. Much of Mars Needs Moms looks terrific -- the extreme longitudinal scale of Mars's space-age infrastructure gives director Simon Wells a big canvas on which to send his characters plummeting and soaring (all to John Powell's thrashing score). The look of the two leads, however, is distractingly uneven: Shot using the same motion-capture technology as Avatar, Gribble looks far more "human" than Milo, presumably because Fogler's expressions could be mapped more intimately, while those of Seth Green had to be finessed onto the face of a young boy. The disparity is the least of the film's WTF details that open the door to meaning without actually inviting it in.
Gribble agrees to help Milo save his mom, and soon they are joined by an Earth-mad Martian named Ki (Elisabeth Harnois), a freewheeling Banksy wannabe who learned English from bad '70s television and fell in love with the world of color and laughter it promised. Their adventure moves along swiftly, and is spruced up with moments of wit and cuteness: Gribble's crush on Ki makes his robot pet vomit nuts and bolts; Ki is bowled over by the human propensity to blush. But the climax requires a sorting of the premise's extremity that Wells punts into zero-gravity hyperspace: Track-suited, stay-at-home moms strapped to gurneys to be exploited by alien females obsessed with work, order, and discipline? Males thrown away for dorking around too much? A rescue scenario of near-Bambi levels of trauma?
In fact Bambi, which debuted on Blu-ray last week, provides an apt reminder that Disney built its name on not shying away from the intense pathos often found in allegorical children's storytelling (and if I recall, "man" is not so popular in that one, either). I salute the effort to go somewhere strange in Mars Needs Moms; if only a fully realized idea -- and not the same, barely concealed right-wing rap, different planet -- had been the destination.