Andrew Stanton’s new sci-fi epic John Carter arrives on the cinematic scene much like a spectacled member of the A/V Club (pocket protector included) walking into a den of angry bullies looking for fresh meat. The buzz has been mostly negative, the film’s production struggles have been well-documented, and there’s little hope that the movie will come close to getting back its ridiculous $250 million budget. That kind of money is normally reserved only for Christopher Nolan Batman sequels and James Cameron pictures; not a film based on relatively obscure subject matter that is directed by a Pixar veteran making his live-action debut. Everything about John Carter screams “disaster,” and many writers, bloggers and prognosticators have treated it with the appropriate vitriol. Talk of the bad buzz has overwhelmed any real discussion of the film’s merits as entertainment, and even then it seems not many have been able to watch the film without thinking of its sizable cost. Admittedly, it’s pretty darn impossible not to keep it in the back of your mind, but as a film John Carter is more of a mixed bag than some may have you believe. Its silliness often overwhelms it, but it’s still a reasonably fun piece of blockbuster entertainment. But considering the resources involved, mere “fun” may not be good enough.
The eponymous role is played by Taylor Kitsch of Friday Night Lights semi-fame, and he’s a Civil War-era loner who gets in trouble with Bryan Cranston out in the ol’ west. The trouble heightens one day when he stumbles across a cave of gold and is mysteriously transported to Mars. Once there he discovers a world of four-armed green aliens called Tharks, tattooed human-esque beings, and several other oddities. Also, he discovers (due to gravity, apparently) that he can suddenly jump, punch and kick real good. He is thrust into the middle of a war between the people of the city Helium—including princess Lynn Collins and King (or “Jeddak”) Ciarán Hinds—and the evil mobile city of Zodanga—including prince Dominic West. The whole ordeal is controlled by Matai Shang, a godlike creature played by Mark Strong.
While I’m going to try and avoid discussing the film’s finances as much as possible, it remains the subtext of just about every shot. But as Willem Dafoe (who voices a Thark) recently said during an interview on the Nerdist podcast: “You didn’t pay for it!” He’s got a point. The only money I’m losing on John Carter is the ten bucks I paid for my matinee ticket, and at the end of the day how the film performs at the box office has absolutely zero effect on me. However, the fact remains that John Carter is one of the more expensive films ever created, and most experts don’t believe that it’s even going to come close. I could go on for hours about how it was an unwise decision by Disney to gamble so much money on something like this, but that ultimately is not the fault of Stanton or the cast. However, the issue remains: if you go all-in on a movie like John Carter, something dazzling better come out. This final result is only intermittently so.
The good news is that Stanton hardly seems lost at sea in the transition to live-action filmmaking. Much like his Pixar cohort Brad Bird, who directed the fantastic Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, he’s got a knack for action and visual flair. Perhaps the transition may have not been as drastic for Stanton as it was for Bird; Stanton is still working mostly with entirely CGI environments, and the actors are made to simply play around inside them. However, said CGI environments have a remarkable attention to detail that can only be created in a film this expensive, and it’s nice to see a movie put every last dollar on the screen. Not only does the CGI in John Carter look good, it looks downright beautiful.
The problem lies more with the worlds that Stanton was charged to create. While his Mars is vast and appropriately epic, the film’s world-building never quite clicked for me. John Carter is based on the early 20th-century stories of Edgar Rice Burroughs, but the way his universe is portrayed on film never feels all that convincing. There’s a certain “making it up as we go along” quality to the vocabulary, the characters and the environments that rubbed me the wrong way for most of the film. Say what you will about the Star Wars prequels (which I just finished watching for my Star Wars Reconsidered project, so there’s a plug) but George Lucas has always been good at creating a living, breathing world that feels like it has always existed and will exist long after the film ends. Every character, building, and planet has a story, and that’s something I never got out of John Carter. It all seemed far too synthetic, though I will give the film credit for not going into Last Airbender-levels of exposition. That could have been awful tempting, and there are some bumps early on, but it never becomes overwhelming.
John Carter does make the potentially fatal mistake of not knowing just how silly it is. The film throws in a couple nice moments of (for lack of a better word) “culture clash” humor, and while I don’t necessarily want it to be a slapstick comedy it would have been nice if it was a tad more self-aware about the ridiculousness of the material. When John Carter starts leaping around the planet Mars, it’s just silly. When his loyal pet Woola runs across the Martian desert at a million miles an hour, it’s silly. John Carter is not humorless, and the aforementioned Woola is a source of much of that humor, but too often the cartoonishness starts to get away from it.
When it becomes a straight action film, John Carter is much more successful. The scenes of Martian combat are stellar, and they are further proof that Stanton knows his way around an actual camera. The film is still plagued by story and character problems—pretty much every development can be seen a mile away, and the romance never really works—but the film doesn’t necessarily aim to change the way science fiction stories are told. It just wants to be a visually exciting, darn fun example of what science fiction can be. The problem is it never takes that next step and becomes the classic it could have been. I was often invested in the happenings onscreen, but never so much so that I was on the edge of my seat. It’s a reasonably fun piece of fluff, though I’m not sure that’s what you want when a film costs $250 million. Well, crap. I told myself I wouldn’t bring that up again.
The cast, curiously (but not erroneously) made up of respected television veterans, fares quite well here. Despite being the lead, Kitsch is never asked to do a whole lot besides be a typical action hero, and he’s reasonably good at it. The same could be said for just about everyone else in John Carter; no one has to give a great performance—and they don’t—but they are able to work quite well as pieces on Stanton’s massive chess board. As a piece of storytelling, John Carter is a relatively unambitious old-fashioned adventure film. As a piece of filmmaking, it aims to be a much more ambitious special effects extravaganza. That is an uneasy marriage, but Stanton is skilled enough to keep the film from completely falling apart. Just barely.
Grade: B-
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