Cinema and technology go hand in hand. As special effects and computer graphics became more advanced, film embraced evolving VFX and utilized their storytelling potential. While things like wall-to-wall CGI are now commonplace in movies, some filmmakers are particularly eager to blend traditional narrative and tech experimentation. Robert Zemeckis’ career is one such example. The Oscar winner behind Forrest Gump has spent decades pushing for grander innovation in the world of movie effects, from the blend of animation and live-action in Who Framed Roger Rabbit to the multiple Michael J Foxes in Back to the Future Part II to the most insane tracking shot in history in Contact.
In the mid-2000s, he became particularly fascinated with motion-capture animation, creating entirely animated worlds with real actors performing in unexpected guises. He was so committed to this new medium that he established a production company, ImageMovers Digital, to create mo-cap movies. It started out well enough, with The Polar Express and Beowulf, which featured big-name actors in fantastical settings that would have been unfeasible or too costly in live-action. For Zemeckis, it was a freeing experience that gave him, a legendary perfectionist, even more control over every aspect of the film. He saw it as the future of the medium. But it only took one mega-flop to off the entire trend.
Mars Needs Moms, based on the children’s book of the same name, is a sci-fi comedy adventure about a group of aliens who kidnap Earth’s best human mothers to extract their maternal care from their brains to train a fleet of nanny-bots. Young Milo, a 9-year-old boy who takes his mom for granted, stows away on the Martian spaceship to save her and show the aliens the importance of family.
Zemeckis didn’t direct Mars Needs Moms — that duty fell to Simon Wells, co-director of The Prince of Egypt — but it bears all the hallmarks of Zemeckis’s mo-cap obsession era. It’s classic schmaltz in its plot, the kind of thing that wouldn’t have felt out of place in theaters in the ‘80s. Mostly, though, it’s joyless and irritating, with some plot holes so large that you could fly a UFO through them. Mars Needs Moms also has some of the most staggeringly retrograde gender norms of any family movie of this era. The human women are valued only for their ability to be stay-at-home mothers, and fatherhood seems to be an entirely foreign concept on both planets. And they still found a way to shoehorn in a sensual alien lady with Pixar-mom hips and pink hair.
But it’s the effects that feel the most egregious. Everything looks rubbery and without weight, and there’s no imagination to the alien settings or creatures. The performances feel off, in large part because the mo-cap tech never figured out how to fix the dead eyes problem that plagued the likes of The Polar Express. Milo’s physical performance is by Seth Green, which adds another layer of uncanny to everything. Frankly, looking at the humans for too long is uncomfortable, particularly Dan Fogler’s gummy-faced “comedic” sidekick. Mars Needs Moms came out only two years after Avatar, but its effects feel decades out of date by comparison. Indeed, the entire film is dated, from its story to Zemeckis’ understanding of children’s entertainment. Adding obscenely expensive tech on top of a shaky foundation only exacerbated its intrinsic problems.
The rubbery-faced, dead-eyed characters of Mars Needs Moms helped bring the mo-cap genre to an end.
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A year before the movie’s release, Disney announced that ImageMovers Digital would cease operations. It was a harbinger of things to come for Mars Needs Moms, which opened to negative reviews and a disastrous box office performance, earning only $39.2 million from a $150 million budget. Adjusted for inflation, it’s still one of the biggest box office bombs of all time, beating the likes of Pan, Jungle Cruise, and Titan A.E. And with that, mo-cap movies went the way of Smell-o-vision, much to the dismay of Zemeckis, who was forced to cancel plans for a Roger Rabbit sequel and a Yellow Submarine movie that would use the tech.
While there is something admirable about Zemeckis’ commitment to trying new things on a grand cinematic scale, it’s also undeniable that his prioritizing of the shiny new tech in favor of a sturdy story or characters has defined the past couple of decades of his work (remember Welcome to Marwen? Or Here?) His devotion to mo-cap never really paid off, partly because the tech was still a few years behind his ambitions, but also because it never felt necessary for the stories he chose. What stopped Mars Needs Moms from being a classic Amblin-esque family sci-fi adventure with practical effects and a real kid in the lead? That’s an answer only Zemeckis can give.
Performance capture has obviously never left cinema. Directors like James Cameron have kept advancing the tech’s abilities to create brand new worlds, and video games have used it to bring a more tactile sensation to their characters through realistic human movement. But there is a reason nobody tries to make movies like Mars Needs Moms anymore, where every single element is computer-generated, and actors’ faces are covered in dots. Even if the script was perfect, audiences’ brains are too hard-wired to accept such startling stumbles into the uncanny valley.