The danger with these sorts of sci-fi/fantasy epics is that often they can get so nerdy and self-referential that only the most hardcore genre fans can watch them without rolling their eyes. Indulge yourself too much in high tech doohickies and fantastical ancient realms and your story can suddenly start to feel more like a history or science lesson than a high stakes adventure. I’ll be honest with you, I wasn’t familiar with the Edgar Rice Burroughs book that John Carter is based on, so after seeing all of the weird stuff in the trailer and reading that its runtime was over two hours, I was pretty nervous that this one was going to either put me to sleep or make me want to give the filmmakers wedgies.
And, I have to tell you, the opening scene confirmed all my fears. We’re thrown right into a battle between two nations of Martian people. They’re on flying ships, alien Gods are teleporting in out of nowhere, and exposition is filling our ears via a bunch of made up history and silly jargon. Basically the opening scene comes off like a bunch of cheesy nonsense. When you’re doing complex world building like this you have to ease your viewer into it, give them a little bit of the new environment at a time, let them get their bearings before you start hitting them with all the big stuff. I really wish that the bad first impression this movie makes could have been avoided, because after the opening scene is over John Carter goes from being cheesy nonsense to cheesy awesomeness.
We transition from Mars to the Old West. John Carter (Taylor Kitsch) is a former Confederate soldier in search of a cave of gold. And in another timeline a few years in the future he’s a rich estate owner with a mansion full of ancient artifacts. From this point on John Carter looks like it could be a gruff Western story about a reluctant hero getting swept up in the dealings of Cavalrymen and Indians, or it could be an epic adventure story about an eccentric millionaire searching the world for an ancient power. I was so intrigued by either possibility that I was dreading the inevitability of the story heading back to Mars. But, despite my prejudices, once he finds a magical thingamabob in the aforementioned cave of gold and gets instantly shipped off to another planet, things stayed fun. Once the mumbo jumbo of the opening scene is out of the way, John Carter becomes an action packed mix of Conan the Barbarian, the Tatooine scenes from Star Wars, and a sort of reverse Superman tale where a human ends up going to Krypton and getting the super powers. There’s monsters, warfare, gladiator battles, doomsday weapons, buxom princesses, and all the swordplay you can handle. Basically, this movie is cool as shit.
If there’s any big question hanging in the air regarding John Carter’s quality, other than it’s deep genre roots, it’s whether or not Taylor Kitsch has what it takes to be a leading man. He did okay playing a supporting role on a TV series in Friday Night Lights, but anchoring a blockbuster feature is a whole other story. You not only have to have some chops, you have to muster up some intangible star presence as well. So how does he do? I’d say that he’s serviceable, but his performance here didn’t give me any indication that he has any great film career in his future. He looks fine when we’re doing the shirtless warrior stuff on Mars, but when he has to don period garb to blend in during street scenes set in 1881 New York, things get a little ridiculous. He’s good when he’s being charming and trading light banter with his female co-star, but when he’s asked to shoulder the weight of the dramatic scenes he seems a little out of his league. The kid is handsome as all get out, and there is something there, but I just don’t know if he has the versatility to really make it as an A-list actor. For a movie that’s big dumb fun like John Carter, het’s not really a problem, but as he tries more roles on for size he might turn into one for some other film. I look forward to hopefully being proven wrong in the future, but for now I’d say that Kitsch’s skills manage to not sink this movie, but they certainly don’t elevate it either.
What does elevate this story from cheesy pulp to quaffable mainstream fare is the supporting performances. Director Andrew Stanton must be a fan of HBO programming, because he’s pilfered their roster of actors, and that goes a long way toward making this inherently goofy material play like it has a little bit of weight. We’ve got Dominic West (The Wire) adding appropriate sleaze as our bad guy, Ciarán Hinds (Rome) giving a kingly character an appropriately regal air, and Lynn Collins (True Blood) adding some spark and sex appeal to the warrior princess. But Stanton doesn’t stop at just pilfering HBO dramas to fill out his cast. He goes after some hugely talented, mainstream names and dresses them up as ridiculous characters as well. Willem Dafoe and Thomas Hayden Church are great as dueling, many-armed, green, Martian natives, Mark Strong is menacing as a bald messenger of the Martian Gods, and Bryan Cranston does that Bryan Cranston thing he does as an 1880s army man back on Earth. This is a story that has been living solely in readers’ imaginations for generations now, and I can’t imagine any of them being disappointed by how these characters were finally brought to life. Stanton didn’t skimp on anything, including the cast.
But, at its heart, John Carter is big fun and a wide-eyed spectacle, so even more important than questions of casting are questions of how the action scenes play and how the special effects look. The action is well presented and consistently fun. It’s over the top, but not thoroughly ridiculous. At his most desperate Carter uses his newly acquired super powers to destroy whole hoards of bad guys, but he also finds plenty of opportunity to be put in danger. When he jumps on a martian aircraft for a speedy getaway he has trouble maneuvering it, he swerves around crashing into things, and he gets away by the skin of his teeth just before he wrecks the thing completely. It’s a far cry from the Star Wars prequels where 8-year-old boys get behind the cockpits of planes and instantly become expert pilots. There’s story behind every action scene we get as well, and the same type of thrills are never presented twice. All of the running and shooting and fighting is happening for a reason, it’s not just a mess of movement and loud noises like in the Transformers films. And there are even some unique story beats that keep you on your toes. One beheading reminded me quite a bit of Indy shooting the swordsman in Raiders, and it had me grinning from ear to ear. If the musical accompaniment wasn’t so big and so generic, I might have loved some of these action scenarios completely. Giving us a memorable theme to hum would have gone a long way.
That’s nitpicking though; John Carter doesn’t even get sunk by its romantic elements. Kitsch and Collins’ characters grow together over the course of the film, but it’s pretty standard, adrenaline junkies bonding over facing danger together stuff; not the sappy melodrama that you can often get in swords and boobs epics. Some will they/won’t they drama plays out in the third act, but it’s never eye rolling or cringe inducing. The romance here is told through sideways glances and buried passion, not through long, lame speeches and endless eye gazing. John Carter is a character who is much more likely to dip a girl and kiss her deeply than he is to cry in her arms, and I appreciated that throwback to cover of a romance novel nonsense quite a bit.
When you look at the big picture, perhaps the main attraction of this film is the special effects. Stanton and his crew have built a fully realized Martian landscape and populated it with all sorts of flying vehicles, sprawling cities, and diverse creatures. Nearly every second that a human actor is on screen they’re interacting with a character who isn’t really there in a space that doesn’t really exist, and none of it is cartoony or distracting. At one point thousands of fake creatures are riding thousands of other fake creatures into battle on a landscape that isn’t real, and I didn’t question it for a second. This is a story that seems like it needed a ton of technology and a ton of technical talent in order to be appropriately told on film, so I’m glad that it got made now and not even ten years ago. If you put the stuff in John Carter next to the stuff Lucas did in The Phantom Menace, there’s just no question which is more photo real.
All of that spectacle comes at a price though, and I’ve heard that this movie cost anywhere from $200 million before advertising up to $350 million once all of the marketing was added on. While I generally had a good time watching it, and I’m glad for longtime fans of the property that it finally got adapted, I have to question the sanity of spending so much money to tell such a typical story. Yes there’s some good action here, and yes there’s sweeping adventure, and yeah there’s even some joy to be had in watching two scantily clad Barbarian types fall in love; but filmmakers were accomplishing things like that in the 70s and 80s on a smaller scale and for a much lesser budget. Even if this thing brings home $250 million in its worldwide grosses, it’s still going to be considered a bomb for Disney. Where’s the sense in that? Did they really need to give us John Carter and his rich, fully-realized alien world? In the end, couldn’t the same fun and excitement have been had just by making a $75 million remake of The Beastmaster?
