If ever there was a movie that I would have liked the main
character to just pause the action, turn to the camera and do a monologue on
what the hell is going on, John Carter
would be at the top of my list. I watched this film all the way through the end
credits, not out of respect for the hard-working men and women who put together
this sci-fi madlib of a movie, but because my brain was turned to such mush
that I forgot how to get up and walk out of the theatre.
John Carter originated
in an 11-novel sci-fi series that began in 1911 and, 100 years later,
apparently filmmakers still feel that the same kind of nonsensical, plot-hole
loaded, tacky crap was going to make for decent entertainment. Perhaps this is
my punishment for not reading books or I can assume that those who saw this
when it came out were handed a brochure explaining how any of this movie made
any sense. I obviously missed something here as it's sitting at a solid 7.0 on
IMDB. Maybe us haters just wanted to block this movie from our memory banks and
chose not put in our two sense.
Taking place in 1868 because you don't have to discuss
satellite surveillance technology in 1868, John
Carter is the bastard child of Disney and Stargate about a war hero that gets teleported to a far away planet
(Mars, in this case), then gets thrust into a major war by a group of locals in
desperate need of a savior despite that that savior is just looking to get back
home.
That's about as much as I'm giving you of the actual plot
because…that's about all that actually worked in my brain. Anyway, because of
the difference in gravity, John Carter is a man of "superhuman"
strength. He practically leaps every time he takes a step; his muscles are more
developed and for that, he is stronger than just about anything on Mars, though
the movie stopped caring about this when it was convenient and over-emphasized
it when it made for a neat 3D effect.
Sadly though, the surroundings and the strength don't
actually seem to matter to the main character. With the same shock and awe that
Keanu Reeves had when he learned Kung Fu, John Carter moseyed along his Mars
expedition, fulfilling prophecies, uncovering conspiracies, performing acts of
heroism and then...ummm…drudging on as if this was normal. I had this same
problem with Green Lantern where Hal
Jordan just passed off his breath-taking new experience as "just another
day at the office."
John Carter's character is one without depth but, because of
a series of Civil War flashbacks, we're made to believe that he is damaged and
traumatized. He's a war hero that doesn't want to fight but wants to go off and
search for a cave of gold, which fits for the whole Gold Rush period in America
during those years, but the movie forgets to give you that little history
lesson and instead, John Carter just looks like a loon that throws
temper-tantrums and doesn't want to do anything really productive and for that,
I struggled to take his heroism seriously. There's no sign that any of his
actions are granting any sort of forward psychological progression and for
that, these flashbacks just seem to be shoved into the story to spell out in
crayon that John Carter is damaged and therefore, his heroism is more epic.
John Carter showed a lot of promise, but just didn’t live up
to it. Putting everything together, John
Carter just looked and felt like a movie that was trying to cram in too
much content and then anticipated it would get approved for a sequel. It was
sloppy and rushed and horribly lazy; Carter was introduced to various tribes
and just seemed to understand their cultures. They even introduced a Martian
language barrier for all of five minutes before someone said, almost verbatim,
"If you want to be able to instantly translate this highly evolved alien
language, just ask." Rosetta Stone eat your heart out.
Along with that, they introduced amazing technologies and John
Carter just seemed to know how they worked (including a distinct lack of
fascination with aerial transportation. Did we forget what year it was,
Disney?). He became subject to religion and prophecy and acted as if he'd known
about it his entire life (whatever that Ninth Ray bullshit is).
It's like Disney stole a page from Battlefield: Earth where they hooked the hero up to a machine and
injected into his brain everything he needed to know about everything ever, but
declined to actually put that scene into the movie out of respect* for the film
it obviously looked up to for this. They must have assumed their entire target
market had memorized the entire book series line by line, so filling in gaping
plot-holes and having no actual substance and nothing even remotely memorable
to walk away with was a tolerable sacrifice to make in order to see their
favorite scenes played out on screen (in 3D!).
I'll briefly ruin this slugfest by saying that there is one John Carter item that I have been
tempted to purchase: the soundtrack. THAT was fun and epic and enjoyable and
fit beautifully to what the scenes COULD have if they didn't suck Martian
ass…but ya know? Not owning that CD is a tolerable sacrifice to make in order
to spit on the grave of this franchise.
A month after John
Carter was released, Disney chairman Rich Ross resigned his post and I can
only say good riddance. Any moron dumb enough to allow this movie to exist deserves
to be cast into the deepest, darkest abyss of the project approval offices at
Telemundo. To you I say, take your 3 dustbusters and crawl off into a corner to
suck up the spiders that have escaped your cranium after successfully spinning
cobwebs around every ounce of creativity you might have had.
*Never ever show any respect to Battlefield: Earth.
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