I was excited for John
Carter after I saw the very first teaser trailer, which provided
infuriatingly little information about any plot or even basis for the story,
but it looked completely bizarre and so, naturally, I was hooked. I went on Saturday. In short, it did not disappoint,
although comparing it to the epic film and special effects pioneer Avatar or the brilliantly and artfully
executed Cowboys & Aliens would be a mistake.
The movie is based (I don’t know how loosely) on Edgar Rice
Burroughs’ A Princess of Mars, the
first in an eleven-volume series written between 1912 and 1943. Why they just now thought to make a
movie out of it is beyond me, although I am
glad it was done now that CGI and other special effects meld darn near
seamlessly with live-action content.
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| Image... uh... borrowed from IMDb |
Something that often suffers when writing plot-driven books (and
suffers again when adapting them for the big screen) is character
development. Perhaps John Carter’s writers used this to their
advantage, because the only character who really needs to be developed—the
titular hero himself—is surprisingly deep. His backstory (fought in the war, family died, nothing left
to lose, etc.), albeit not the most original of them all, is valid and
emotional, not fully revealed until he relives it himself in flashbacks while
slicing and dicing aliens in a slow-motion rage.
The plot felt a bit crammed in places, which is often the
result of trying to fit too much book into too little movie. When you’ve got a few hundred pages and
a committed reader, sub-plots are delightful. But when you have 120-or-so minutes with an audience
constantly trying to pick the next scene to skip for a popcorn refill or
bathroom run, sub-plots become incommodious, and a couple of them—such as one
of the tharks’ (a race of Martians) discovery that she is the leader’s daughter—could
have been sacrificed for the sake of development more integral to the overall
plot.
Undue emphasis was placed on the war between the two cities,
when the really interesting stuff (like the conflict between John Carter and
the supernatural therns who seem to
be the real antagonists) tended to slip between the cracks.
The film draws a few giggles, and convincing the audience to
like—adore, even—a downright ugly monster that looks like a very large frog. It
panted and whined like any earth dog, and I even think I heard it bark
once. According to John Carter, if you’ve suspended enough
disbelief to handle civilizations on other planets and magical drinks that translate alien languages, Martians are not so alien. In fact, they could have been made to
act a little more alien, if you ask
me. And not so British. There are apparently a lot of Brits on
Mars. However, the damsel in
distress—who, to her credit, does an impressive amount of butt-kicking—does
literally shake John Carter’s hand,
jiggling it by the thumb, which was pretty funny, if predictable.
The end was well done, though I suppose I won’t talk about
it too much. Based on what the
rest of the Internet has to say, it doesn’t look good for a sequel, but if they
make one, I’ll go see it.
