'John Carter' - Movie Review

By Bob Garver

I feel sorry for Mars. It’s been at the cen­ter of so many bad movies over the past decade or so. 2000 saw a pair of immense dis­ap­point­ments in “Mis­sion to Mars” and “Red Planet”. There was an ani­mated flop last year called “Mars Needs Moms”. It was also the set­ting for the most bor­ing parts of “Watch­men”. Now it’s the set­ting for “John Carter” a film whose box office per­for­mance is already a punchline.

Per­haps the mar­ket­ing peo­ple knew that Mars is box office poi­son, that’s why they made the last minute deci­sion to change the film’s title from “John Carter of Mars” to just “John Carter”. Now all that peo­ple can tell about the film from its title is the name of the main char­ac­ter. I’ve also noticed that a lot of peo­ple con­fuse this name with John Con­ner, and mis­tak­enly think that the film is part of the “Ter­mi­na­tor” fran­chise. I guess the film is grate­ful to have this audi­ence because it needs all the help it can get.

In the film, John Carter (Tay­lor Kitsch) is a loser Civil War vet­eran on a quest for a cave of gold. The cave turns out to be a por­tal to Mars, where the local crea­tures don’t know what to make of him. The species does its best to stay out of a war between the planet’s humans, even though the evil side will prob­a­bly go after them once they’ve elim­i­nated the good. The only per­son who can return Carter to Earth is Princess Dejah (Lynn Collins) of the good humans, who is set to marry the leader of the bad guys in a sham wed­ding. Carter is forced to step up to pro­tect “peo­ple” he barely knows, yet have so much to teach him about himself.

Per­haps the biggest flaw of the film is its reliance on made-up words. The locals refer to the planet as “Bar­soom” instead of Mars, the char­ac­ters them­selves have strange names, and there are plenty of unique terms for places and objects. The con­fus­ing lan­guage makes the action hard to fol­low and the whole film unnec­es­sar­ily com­pli­cated. By the way, I didn’t have this prob­lem last week when I saw the movie based on a Dr. Seuss book, and he’s best known for using made-up words. Another con­fus­ing aspect of the film is that the char­ac­ters from the main alien species all look alike. And I mean all of them — the males are indis­tin­guish­able from the females.

The film does one thing right, and it quickly squan­ders the oppor­tu­nity. When he first arrives on Mars, Carter has trou­ble adjust­ing to the planet’s grav­ity. There’s a funny sequence where he repeat­edly flops, floats, soars, and crash-lands. But all too soon he gets the hang of walk­ing and stays pretty much on his feet for the rest of the film, save for a few scenes where he’s required to jump high. Imag­ine the pos­si­bil­i­ties if he strug­gled with grav­ity for the whole film. It would be funny to see him try to carry on a stan­dard con­ver­sa­tion while invol­un­tar­ily doing flips in midair.

I think the main thing that makes “John Carter” unin­ter­est­ing is that we don’t get a feel for any of the cul­tures on Mars. We’re told which char­ac­ters we’re sup­posed to root for, but we don’t know exactly what makes them the good guys. Even if we did, we wouldn’t care because we wouldn’t remem­ber their names. Except for John Carter of course, that name is easy to remem­ber. We’ll all remem­ber the name of “John Carter”, one of the lousi­est films of the year.

One and a Half Stars out of Five.

“John Carter is rated PG-13 for intense sequences of vio­lence and action. Its run­ning time is 132 minutes.

Con­tact Bob Garver at rrg251@nyu.edu.

Posted by Bob Garver on Mar 13 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.