Film Review: John Carter (2012)

By Aaron Jankowski

Disney’s John Carter, written and directed by Andrew Stanton, is a visual feast but loses a lot of steam when the warring stops and the talking starts.

John Carter stars Taylor Kitsch as the title role, and Lynn Collins as a princess of the alien race Helium, Dejah Thoris.

The film, based off of the series of books written by Edgar Rice Burroughs, starts off on Earth, as we are introduced to John Carter, a former captain of the Confederate Army during the American Civil War, as he is searching for a cave of gold. His hunt is interrupted when Col. Powell, played wonderfully if not briefly, by Bryan Cranston, tries to conscript Carter to help him hunt down natives. Carter tries to escape Powell multiple times which provides good comic relief the first time, but quickly grows tiresome (sadly, this is a trend in the film.) Once Carter finally escapes, he is chased by Powell and his men into the desert where they run into a group of natives. When Powell is shot during the skirmish that ensues, we are showed John Carter’s inner good when he circles around and saves him.

While Carter and Powell are looking for a place to hide from the natives, they find exactly what Carter was looking for, the cave of gold.

Inside the cave, Carter is confronted by a stranger who attacks him, we later find out this man is a Thern, who are immortals that we later find out are the baddies of the film. It ends up the cave is a transporter used to send people from Earth to Mars, as long as they have the right medallion and know the proper phrase. While Carter is inspecting the dead Thern, he ends up being transported to Mars.

Does this sound confusing? Because once Carter lands on Mars, things only get worse.

Stanton must have believed that he could not leave anything from Burroughs books out. The plot on Mars is ripe with political unrest and civil war between two alien cities (though the race looks human minus a few red tattoos), the city of Helium and Zodanga.

The first aliens Carter encounters, however, are the Tharks. These guys look alien. They have four arms, horns and are tall skinny and green.

The Tharks are much like the natives on Earth, they are sitting back and watching as the “more advanced” cities of Helium and Zodanga battle it out, waiting for them to eliminate themselves.

Carter is instantly adopted into the Thark numbers because of his ability to jump tremendous heights and lengths (due to the density of his bones and the difference in gravity on Mars...)

The Thark leader is voiced by Willem Dafoe, who does a fine enough job as the enthusiastic but stern Tars Tarkas.

Much like the comedic escape attempts, there is a drawn out “humorous” scene when Carter learns how to walk with the lower gravity. (Note to writers: a man falling on his face is only funny so many times.)

While the first act of the movie moved rather slow, the film picks up a bit when Carter gets to Mars.

The first taste of the battle between the two human like cities comes when Princess Dejah Thoris attempts to escape Helium to avoid marrying Sab Than, the merciless leader of Zodanga who is aided by the Therns. (Yes, the two cities are at work, but a marriage between the leader of one and the princess of the other is supposed to bring peace, blah blah blah.)

Sab Than attempts to shoot her ship out of the air and a futuristic dog fight breaks out while the Tharks merely watch from the ground and take bets. 

When Dejah is bucked from her ship and is holding onto the edge for her life, Carter notices she looks human. His instinct is to save the only other human he has seen on the planet. The only thing is, his instinct to save someone who looks human leads him to kill countless other human looking creatures. I suppose we are supposed to focus on the sword play rather than the logic though.

Long story short, Dejah knows how to get John Carter back to Earth, but she would prefer if he stayed and helps Helium win the war.

At first, Carter refuses, but much like we saw him save Powell at the beginning, his inner good guy takes over and he helps fight for Helium.

As you may well be able to tell, one of the biggest draw backs to John Carter is its incredibly detailed political unrest. It is an interesting story, but seems way too congested. Imagine if other films inspired by the John Carter books through their entire plot on you at once, such as Star Wars.

It is just too much.

Because of this, the film that runs only about 130 minutes feels like it is well into three hours long. It also doesn’t help that Kitsch delivers a lot of his lines with a Christian Bale circa Dark Knight type throaty voice. It was annoying when a great actor did it; it’s almost unbearable when a not so good one does it. That said, Kitsch was brought in to look good almost naked and kick ass, and he did both.

The script does have a few genuine classic lines; however, the best of them are delivered in such passive non-memorable ways. The best of which, seemed completely out of place. As if Stanton came up with it on the fly and had to just randomly drop it into the script.

Lynn Collins was good as the half naked princess, but she wasn’t really asked to deliver too much. (For the record, Star Wars also wins the battle of half naked princesses.)
The film wraps its self up rather nicely. The audience gets its big final battle it is dying for by the end of the film, and it even packs a little bit of a surprise.

Score: 8/10

Acting: 5/10

Effects/Visuals: 9/10

Writing: 5/10

Directing: 5/10

Overall: 32/50

Take Away Thought: Sure, George Lucas and James Cameron got some inspiration from the John Carter books when writing Star Wars and Avatar, but the problem is, they made their films first. This means that despite John Carter being the source material for a lot of the visuals you’ll see in the film, it still feels clichéd and done, because it has been done, and much better in those respective films. It should also be noted that I was uncomfortably bored in the theatre during a lot of this movie. Whenever there wasn’t a battle, I was bored.