John Carter was never a truly thrilling idea to me. When trailers began to show up, I felt skeptical of how faithful it could be to the novel, for which I am not a fan of but have heard great things. John Carter came out with more and more trailers with Disney urging audiences to come and see the movie. The Edgar Rice Burroughs novels from which it is based upon contained 11 volumes, many of which Carter did not appear in, but Disney is determined. Throwing over 200 million dollars and one of their top directors, Andrew Stanton, into the project, they hoped for the best. Reviews started coming out and some were extremely positive while others tore the film down completely. Was my skepticism proven wrong? Somewhat.
John Carter is about an American civil war soldier named John Carter (Taylor Kitsch). After he wanders into a cave, Carter finds himself transported to Mars in the middle of their own civil war. If Carter wants to get some answers, he must stop the marriage of Princess Dejah (Lynn Collins) and the corrupted Prince Sab Than (Dominic West). Honestly, I remembered barely any of the names of these characters. I had to look all of them up online. The reason for this is that many of the characters in this movie are completely forgettable. Either that or it may be the fact that there are just so many people to keep track of besides the one name said at least once every ten minutes, John Carter. It’s a good thing that the actors do a good job of portraying these characters. Even those who provide the voice of the savage alien species have personality to them.
Unfortunately, John Carter suffers from some uneven pacing. Throughout most of the first half of the movie I was bored. Things were unexplained and left alone, coming off more annoying than intriguing. Things begin to ramp up later on, but I never found myself fully invested. John Carter is lucky enough to have an interesting lore to its universe. The depiction of the aliens is well done, but once again, many things are left unexplained. The trouble is that the movie can’t afford to invest more time into it with a runtime of over two hours. The film just barely has enough time to wrap up nicely and if there was added time, I’m not sure I’d be all that more invested.
John Carter’s dialogue is not what the problem is, it’s the action. Ridiculous stunts are preformed under the context that the gravity of Mars is to blame and I’m hoping most self-respecting humans would notice that that simply doesn’t explain it. Important characters are dealt with in a split-second and war strategy turns to “walk in and shoot them.” Stanton writes for what could have been a cool animated movie, but is shut down by the realism the film seems to embody. Stanton’s work with the direction is similar to his writing. He works best within the parameters of animation and he doesn’t make the transition as well as Brad Bird did with Mission Impossible. Over-the-top-ness can be a good thing, but not with a movie with such serious undertones.
John Carter was enjoyable to the part of me that liked blood, giant battles, and aliens, but when that was stripped away by how serious the film can be, I felt somewhat abandoned. John Carter is by no means bad, but it is quite forgettable and unfortunately boring. 6/10
