Movie review: Mars Needs Moms "A son's wish: the answer to a galactic dilemma"

When we slam the door in anger, we refuse to see her tears while she cries in the other room.


The trash. The phone. The veggies. We kids have always been trapped by these hostile aliens and worse, our moms' nagging voices. It seems like an inevitable stage in our childhood, and we inevitably go against it. Maybe we loathe them at times because we're still kids, and we clearly have no idea how much it would hurt when we can no longer hear their voices.

"I think it's way better if I didn't have a mom at all." Little did Milo (Seth Green) know those words marked the cue for the Marsians to sieze her mother (Joan Cusack), and he witnessed how she was going to pay for it.


It's not the moon this time, but far out to Mars as Walt Disney Pictures landed us to the planet scientists have always suspected to possess intelligent life. With its release of Mars Needs Moms (2011, directed by Simon Wells), we discovered not only the worse--and unbelievable scenario of an uncontrollable population explosion in outer space, but also our moms' tears whenever we say bad things to her and mean it.

They snuck in the middle of the night. Just as Milo decided to say sorry to his mom after a minor fight, he saw a flash of light from his mom's room, and it was too late.


Filled with guilt, fear and longing at last, Milo boldly hopped on to the Marsian space ship. He met Gribble (Dan Fogler) along the way, and discovered the horrible truth about how Marsians extract moms' brains to become nanny-bots, trained to take care of their young sprouting like potatoes from the ground every 25 years.

With the help of Gribble and a kind, Earth-curious Marsian named Ki (Elisabeth Harnois), Milo fought time and zero-gravity only to realize in the end how much his mom loves him more than he does to her.


On the other hand, it was heartbreaking to discover Gribble's story, surviving  Mars's harsh elements as a kid, after her own mom was abducted and he wasn't able to save her.

The movie also made me believe there's a purpose for everything, in the scene when Milo's oxygen tank broke into pieces and Gribble ran off to the hill where he hid the helmet he was supposed to give to his own mom to save her, and gave it to them. Remembering what his mom said, he did the right thing for the first time and helped Milo so he wouldn't lose his mom the way Gribble lost his.


Somehow it's never too late nor too embarrassing to say we love our moms, because we don't want to feel that much pain and guilt when we lose them.