MARS NEEDS MOMS Directed by Simon Wells. Voices of Seth Green, Tom Everett Scott, Joan Cusack, Elisabeth Harnois, Dan Fogler, Dee Bradley Baker, James Earl Jones PG cert, gen release, 88 min

BUT MOMS evidently don't need Mars Needs Moms. With a price tag of $180 million plus and an opening US weekend take of $6.9 million, this dreary looking animation may be Disney's biggest flop in a decade.

The film can already claim the dubious distinction of being the 12th worst opening of all time for a general Stateside release. It has, moreover, inspired a shrill volume of social networking among American parents for whom the title has come to represent the nadir of tacked-on, overpriced 3D admission tariffs.

Disney has responded swiftly and categorically by pulling the plug on similarly themed motion-capture projects, most notably Robert Zemeckis's long-gestating Yellow Submarineremake.

They're not wrong. This creepy motion-capture business has gone on long enough. As with earlier Zemeckis-branded chicanery ( Beowulf, A Christmas Carol, The Polar Express), punters at Mars Needs Mumsare consistently minded to ask why they're watching Joan Cusack's animated death mask when they might be watching Joan Cusack?

The 3D is similarly problematic. It’s not just that the film is too dark in the first place; outer space was never going to look all that dazzling with the 30 per cent loss of brightness necessitated by dimmed glasses. It’s that the processing looks unbelievably dire.

Often, the 3D is so rough and ready we’re left looking at competing blurry images where the polarisation appears to split the picture into competing factions. Indeed, for a good deal of the run time, this family space opera is virtually unintelligible, an unforgivable lapse for a film that was intended as a slides’n’rides spectacle.

Somewhere, deep in the quagmire, is a solid little story about a boy (Seth Green’s stringy body; Tom Everett Scott’s voice) who wishes he didn’t have a mom (the late Joan Cusack apparently) to nag him about chores. He soon changes his mind when marauding Martians kidnap her so that she might play mommy to alien younglings. It turns out the extra- terrestrial ladies have abandoned their maternal instincts to form a tyrannical regime of Working Mothers.

An improving moral and crummy special effects to boot. Interplanetary relations have rarely looked so bleak. Or so fuzzy.