John Carter (2012) – Review

Originally titled John Carter Of Mars and not to be confused with John Carpenter Of Mars (which technically would be Ghosts Of Mars), Pixar’s Andrew Stanton went all in when trying to adapt Edgar Rice Burroughs’ legendary sci-fi series that first saw print in 1912. If not for Burroughs’ works, we probably wouldn’t have gotten the likes of Star Wars or Flash Gordon (of course, we probably wouldn’t have gotten Jupiter Ascending either, but swings and roundabouts I suppose), so the importance of John Carter’s influence simply cannot be overstated and it was high time that the Mars dwelling hero finally got his cinematic due. However, when the space dust settled, John Carter emerged as one of the most expensive flops in history with fingers being pointed virtually everywhere for reasons for it’s failure – but is it really as bad as its reputation really suggests or has the red planet once again served host to yet another movie that burned up on re-entry?

Former Confederate Army Captain John Carter is tired of fighting other people’s wars and has now dedicated his nomadic life to discovering enough gold to afford him the life of living separate from the rest of the world. However, the grizzled soldier turned prospector finds way more than he bargained for when a run in with the cavalry sees him stumble upon a strange cave loaded with gold and a strange, bald being who is shot dead by Carter in self defence. After touching a strange medallion on the dead man’s person, Carter suddenly finds himself transported from Arizona territory to the planet Barsoom (which we know as Mars) and a whole new chapter of his life begins.
The upside is that due to the shift in gravity and some twaddle about physiology, John is now far stronger than he used to be and can leap vast distances like some sort of chiseled flea, the downside is he’s wandered into the middle of yet another civil war that has been raging for generations. But recently, the cities of Helium and Zodanga (helpfully clad in blue and red respectfully) have found their fortunes shifting as the warlike Zodanga have gained a significant advantage thanks to their leader, Sab Than, being gifted a superweapon by the mysterious, shapeshifting Therns who want to influence rule on the red planet. But while the Therns want to force marriage between Sab Than and the Helium princess Dejah Thoris, Carter finds himself being captured by the Tharks, a race of desert dwelling, green-skinned beings who have no interest in the wars of the red-skinned ones, but who have plenty of political issues within their own ranks. Gaining the trust of Thark chieftain Tars Tarkas, Carter’s abilities suddenly put him in good stead, but when Dejah Thoris attempts to escape her situation by literally escaping, the Martian princess and the Confederate Earth man find themselves in a battle to save the entire planet.

You can really tell that director Andrew Stanton really wanted John Carter to work with every fiber of his being as his earnest attempt to bring Edgar Rice Burroughs’ non-Tarzan hero to the screen screams of passion project. No expense has been spared in bringing Barsoom to life; Avatar levels of tech have been utilised to bring the tusked, four-armed Tharks to life, copious levels of CGI are splashed across the screen and Stanton has the whole tale bristle with old-school, Errol Flynn style swashbuckling that fits the tone exceedingly well. Hey, who knows, if you’d read the book and was already familiar with the universe at large, seeing it visualised on the big screen must have had been admittedly a fulfilling experience – but unfortunately for the rest of us, the film is something a breathless sprint that has no time to actually make us newbies care about what is going on. Some of it works. The western opening that transitions into sci-fi/adventure just sings perfectly of pulp literature and the time we spend with the Tharks feels like the best parts of the Na’vi, the Fremen and the Sandpeople all mushed together in a green gangly ball. Better yet, Willem Defoe’s blistering Tal Tarkas and Samantha Morton’s outcast Sola manage to be two of the few standouts of an expansive cast that also include Dominic West, Ciarán Hinds, Mark Strong, Bryan Cranston, James Purefoy and Thomas Haden Church, but once the film shifts focus to the more human looking members of the cast, it soon gets bogged down in trying to world build at breakneck speed.

World building can be incredibly hard – especially when franchise like Star Wars and Lord Of The Rings make it feel so organic – but the two hours and twelve minutes of runtime John Carter has settled simply just isn’t enough. While the story gives the Western and Thark sections room to breathe, everything involving Helium, Zodanga and the Therns are delivered at such a pace that you soon start to experience something Barsoom related concussion as the players start pounding you with alien sounding names and concepts that gives you no time to process them. Lynn Collins’ Dejah Thoris in particular is saddled with trying to make lines like “With no one to stop Zodanga it will be the beginning of the end! You are a Jeddak of Helium! You must find another way!” sound even remotely natural, but the movie is in such a hurry to fit everything in, virtually none of the exposition manages to stick the landing half as well as one of Carter’s superhuman leaps. As a result, the whole plot soon devolves into the equivalent of someone excitedly screaming “AND THEN, AND THEN, AND THEN, AND THEN!” at you as twists and revelations whip by and without some pre-existing knowledge that a read of the book would have given you, it’s virtually impossible to care, no matter how hard Taylor Kitsch tries to half-ass Han Solo his way through things.
Still, the action is still pretty nifty as Kitsch bounds his way through various set pieces like a half-naked jumping bean, fighting off giant alien gorillas and bouncing between space ships like a long haired Super Mario, but once again, the rather comprised story telling doesn’t really give us a reason to care what everyone’s fighting for. Add to this an advertising campaign that some described as the worst in movie history, and John Carter’s most recent legacy regrettably ends up being that Burroughs’ universe is more synonymous with being a box office dumpster fire rather than helping to fire the imagination of some of sci-fi/fantasy’s biggest minds.

While Andrew Stanton’s delirious passion for the pulp adventures of John Carter aren’t entirely deserving of the super-flop reputation the film went on to receive, it certainly didn’t help that the long awaited debut of Carter on the big screen hamstrung itself with asking a bewildered audience to choke down exposition at the speed of a intergalactic hot dog eating competition. While I would personally chalk up John Carter as more of a good natured failure than an excursion into legitimately bad filmmaking, once again, it seems that the Red Planet has claimed yet another cinematic victim in the pantheon of misfiring Mars movies.
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