Meet The Robinsons is a 3D outing so technically dazzling that you'll hear people say "Wow!" out loud in the theatre during the first few minutes.

The problem? The remaining 98 minutes.

Once you've finished marvelling over the eye-popping three-dimensional setting for the story, it's tough to overlook the fact that ... there is no story, really.

Meet The Robinsons is a series of inside-pop-culture jokes and tired platitudes, all stapled together with noise and nonsense. It's frantic and frenzied and it doesn't make a lot of sense.

Of course, the general rule of thumb in moviedom is that more than three writers spells trouble, and Meet The Robinsons has seven. Count 'em. And for all their efforts, there's little here you haven't seen before.

Meet The Robinsons concerns a science geek named Lewis (voice of Daniel Hansen). Lewis was abandoned as an infant and left on the orphanage porch, and as an adolescent is a budding inventor -- whose inventions seem to have stopped him from being adopted. An early scene, for example, has him spraying potential parents with peanut butter and jelly.

Lewis has devised a memory machine that he hopes will permit him to remember the face of his birth mother, so that he can be reunited with her. This flirtation with abandonment issues is abruptly ended when another adolescent boy, Wilbur Robinson (Wesley Singerman), turns up in a time machine to convey Lewis into the future. Only Lewis can stop a bad guy from stealing the memory machine and messing up the future, or something.

Anyway, that time-travel twist of fate lets the movie introduce all the eccentrics in the Robinson family, as well as a villainous hat, a T-Rex and some talking plant people. Instead of finding his mother, Lewis finds himself in the future and discovers that he is going to have a family after all.

Maybe you had to be there.

Meet The Robinsons is full of winking references to other movies (Back To The Future, The Jetsons, etc.) but not for any reason we could understand. To amuse adults? To fill in time? In lieu of a story? To show how clever the writers are? It's a mystery.

The film turns on a personal motto of Walt Disney himself: Keep Moving Forward. It's the guiding phrase for Lewis, keeping him from dwelling in the past and permitting him to build an empire in the future. That's the American Dream. Maybe he'll get his head frozen one day, too.

Meet The Robinsons will amuse children and bemuse adults, like most so-called family movies.

(This film is rated G)
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