I was going to pass over this one, but my desire to hear another John Powell animated music score after last year's magnificent "How To Train Your Dragon" led me to see it.  I haven't been much of a fan of Robert Zemeckis' CG animated works, and while it does fare better than "The Polar Express" and "A Christmas Carol", Mars Needs Moms is still a painfully average movie.

To be fair, the film does boast a great sci-fi setting.  The martian world is immense yet meticulously crafted, providing a keen cinematic playground for our characters to romp around in.  From alien spaceships, to a vast garbage wasteland, and finally onto the surface of the titular planet itself, the look and feel of Mars Needs Moms' environments are superbly realized.  (While I'm certain the movie would look just as good in 2D, I took in a 3D viewing, and the added depth lent greatly to the visuals.)  Indeed, director Simon Wells appeared to be channeling his great grandpappy H.G. when it came to envisioning this movieverse.  The mo-cap animation is also incredibly fluid and realistic, while the facial animation teeters between awe-inspiringly impressive and unsettlingly realistic.  (Yes, there's still a bit of that uncanny valley thing going on that has managed to plague all of Zemeckis' animations.)

Where the movie stumbles is in its story.  Mars Needs Moms has ultimately been categorized as a "chase film", which means the main protagonist Milo tends to spend a lot of time either running, falling, or swinging madly about.  A good chunk of the boy's dialogue dwells on excessive pleading in the hopes of finding his kidnapped mother, or helpless rumination for the many failed attempts to do so.  It doesn't make for an especially compelling narrative, though things are shaken up a bit when the character of Gribble shows up.  I didn't find Gribble nearly as obnoxious as other critics have made him out to be, and I even found his 'child of the 80s' shtick to be rather endearing.  The dynamics of the film get infinitely more interesting when Ki, the female martian who goes rogue to help the duo, enters the mix.  She's actually a very likeable character, and her wild-eyed naiveness and enthusiastic 1970s sensibilities play host to a number of cheeky generational jokes when interspersed with Gribble's said '80s persona.

I would have been inclined to write off the plot as a rote and tepid affair, save for what happens when Milo finally reaches his mom.  It's an emotional climax that managed to jolt me upright, and I was surprised to find myself getting genuinely misty-eyed.  There's a moral message about parental appreciation lurking in the backdrop throughout the film, and it all comes to ahead here.

And finally, Powell's music score, which is unequivocally the best thing about this film.  It's not quite on How To Train Your Dragon level of melodious, thematic complexity, but it's a solid effort, and certainly far more structured than Powell's previous animated works.  His use of the orchestra and instrumentation is pleasing to the ear, and while ethnic-specific instruments (like the Irish fiddle and bagpipes used in Dragon) are much less prevalent this time around, in their place is his trademark electronic style to match Mars' modern day scenario.  The soundtrack is agreeable enough, especially for its heroically rousing main theme, but it's difficult to draw a contextual connection when the movie itself fails to impress.