The very idea of a Confederate cavalryman transported, in the blink of an eye, to Mars is an idea so juicy it sounds impossible to muck up.
The potential is there for both epic, Tolkeinian sweep and confrontational social commentary. Just imagine what a director like Samuel Fuller would do with this material, with his bigoted Civil War straggler finding an all-new batch of Others to enslave on the red planet.
But leave it up to Hollywood to take the coolest splashy-franchise premise in more than a decade and produce a shameless, coattail-riding mediocrity whose primary function is merchandising cross-promotion. This 3D quagmire’s budget was more inflated than our gas prices, but the filmmakers have no originality to show for it.
John Carter is essentially a “cover movie” — a bad karaoke compilation of tired hits, with co-writer and director Andrew Stanton pilfering ideas from Star Wars, Avatar, Gladiator, Braveheart, Superman and the Pixar corpus that Stanton helped perfect, in another life.
John Carter — appropriately played by an actor named Taylor Kitsch — is a Civil War soldier from Virginia who, while running from Apaches, discovers a medallion in a gold-crusted cave that unwittingly transports him to another place and time: The planet Barsoom, which we call Mars. It’s inhabited by several tribes, some of them Homo sapiens who are engaging in their own civil war.
Carter falls in with the Tharks, collective of four-armed, betusked green men and women (the ladies’ tusks hang down like tzitzit on Orthodox Jews) inexplicably voiced by Willem Dafoe, Thomas Haden Church and Samantha Morton. Though he would love nothing more than to return to Earth, he is convinced to stay by Dejah Thoris (Lynn Collins), a conveniently helpless and gorgeous princess, scientist, and Carter’s obvious lust object/love interest/newly acquired raison d’etre.
There are bird-shaped aircraft, shape-shifters, dinosauric mammoths, electro-shock weapons, flashbacks within flashbacks and the occasional subtitle, all for naught. In 132 minutes, Stanton is unable to establish anything close to an emotional investment in any of its characters’ plights, which he insists are dire: “If Helium falls, so does Barsoom!” warns Dejah, she of the Helium people. Kitsch is subjected to uttering one demonstrably silly line after another and pretending they are monumental, usually accompanying them with a scowl or grimace.
Stanton is obviously a talented, even visionary director. A New Yorker profile last year revealed as much, and, for animated films, his wordless opening of Wall-E is unparalleled in its audacity. In his live-action debut, Stanton expresses a genuine exuberance and love of cinema’s inherent capacity only once, when Carter first lands on Mars and struggles to walk on the planet’s gravitational axis before learning how to adapt. It’s a fun sequence, resembling a child learning how to ride a bike.
But the rest of John Carter is rote formula of the rankest common denominator, devoid of aesthetic personality. Its plot structure is an insult to cookie cutters. Obviously, Carter’s status as a rebel for the wrong cause is completely whitewashed (the distributor here is Disney, after all); that whole slavery thing that prompted the war is never addressed, with the character’s motivations revealed in a series of fuzzy flashbacks about his chalk-white family perishing in a fire.
And rather than create the Tharks with their own unique, interstellar culture, Stanton gives them banal human psychology, facial expressions and the vocal cords of B-list actors. Same-old, same-old.
I’ve never read any of the Edgar Rice Burroughs adventure series on which John Carter is based, but I’m going to assume the source material has been butchered. This film version is nothing but a mooching receptacle of consumer excess, proof that Stanton should stick to his forte — iconic animated masterpieces — and stop embarrassing himself.
JOHN CARTER. Director: Andrew Stanton; Cast: Taylor Kitsch, Lynn Collins, Samantha Morton, Willem Dafoe, Thomas Haden Church, Mark Strong, Ciaran Hinds, Dominic West, Bryan Cranston; Distributor: Disney; Rating: PG-13; Opens: Friday everywhere