Summary:
A civil war vet is transported to Mars where he discovers factions on the edge of war.
My Thoughts:
When this movie came out I knew that it wasn’t amazing, but I still liked it despite that fact. This is the kind of film that comes very close to being one of my guilty pleasure movies. It has a silly but kind of cool premise; it has some ridiculous worldbuilding that feels akin to sword and sorcery b-movies (like “Conan the Barbarian” or “Solomon Kane”); and it’s a genuinely fun film even though the lead actor is stiff as a board and the plot is rushed and filled with holes.
This film isn’t amazing, but it does rely on some interesting source material, which really helps to flush out the world of Barsoom (Mars). We get an idea of how the 12-foot aliens communicate, and we get a sense of their culture. There’s also quite a bit of backstory that’s given to the political climate; in a way, this feels like “Dune”-lite (though I have to point out that Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote John Carter of Mars back in the 1910s). While a lot of that backstory of different factions and races is touched on, we don’t really spend much time developing their races beyond a few minor distinguishing details. Look at this film compared to a movie like “Lord of the Rings: Return of the King”. That film builds a number of different races and establishes parts of their culture, their history, and the rituals surrounding their religious or superstitious beliefs. This film spends almost the same amount of screen time establishing the world, but this world feels far glossier, and far more superficial.
This movie suffers from what “Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace” and all of the other prequel Star Wars movies suffer from: CGI sets instead of practical ones. It’s incredibly noticeable when you put an actor or actress against a green screen and asked them to act as if their interacting with something not there, and it’s even more noticeable when you’re working with an actor like Taylor Kitsch (“Savages”), whom has a blank look on his face 90% of the time he’s in front of the camera. While the CGI is mostly good, there are a few glaring scenes that look nigh-cartoonlike.
I know that this film was a major flop for Disney; they invested big time. They wanted this to be the next “Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl”; they wanted a franchise. Well, they did a few things horribly wrong, and the worst thing was having Kitsch as lead. I don’t think Kitsch is a terrible actor, but I don’t think he’s a very good leading actor. Cast him as a back up roll, where he has a few lines and maybe a funny moment, and he’s perfectly adequate. However, Kitsch should not be the lead in a two-hundred-and-fifty-million dollar sc-fi epic, especially when they have far superior actors already in the cast. Why did we have to have Kitsch as the lead when they covered up Willem Dafoe (“At Eternity’s Gate”) in CGi? In fact, we see appearances from Mark Strong (“Shazam!”), Ciaran Hinds (“The Woman in Black”), Dominic West (“300”), Bryan Cranston (“Drive”), James Purefoy (“A Knight’s Tale”), and Thomas Hayden Church (“Spider-Man 3”), and every single one of them is better than Kitsch.
I honestly am not sure what happened with the writing. I think maybe the writers Mark Andrews, Andrew Stanton, and Michael Chabon, all of whom have their major in Pixar films like “A Bug’s Life” and “Wall-e”, were used to writing for kids and animated films, and when they brought their ideas to this story, it just wasn’t the right fit. I think some of the best parts of this movie are the parts that feel most out of place; the weird dog-alien thing that follows John Carter around, the bits when he’s jumping all over the place and trying to figure out the world- the fun bits. All of that stuff really works, but it feels like it would be more at home in a Pixar movie vs a sci-fi action movie. We can’t have a hilarious dog creature licking Carter happily, and then two scenes also have a montage of Carter mercilessly murdering hundreds of aliens, spilling their blue blood in gallons. What kind of tone are we going for? It tries to appeal to all audiences, and in the end, fails to appeal to a single demographic.
Taking my qualms with the writing a bit further, the dialog is absolutely hilarious. It takes a skilled actor to be able to spew a line of sci-fi techno-babble and make it sound not only convincing but also intelligible, and as we’ve already said, Taylor Kitsch is not that talented actor. I have no idea if this is true, but it feels as if the writers simply lifted phrases from the books and plopped them into their screenplay in hopes that it would make their world sound more unique… It half works.
Verdict:
I almost gave this film a 3/5 star rating, just because it is still have a lot of fun moments. In fact, the only reason I went back to this movie at all was because my brother and I were hanging out, and we’d watched this film together in theaters and thought it would be fun to revisit it. It was. However, just because this movie has some fun moments, doesn’t mean it makes for a guilty pleasure movie I could watch multiple times. I’ve seen this as many times as I need to see it. It doesn’t have the ultra-cheesy, yet ultra-earnest quality that movies like “Conan the Destroyer” or “Dragonslayer” have; it feels too manufactured. While this movie isn’t a terrible way to spend two hours and fifteen minutes, there are more entertaining sci fi flicks out there.
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