Yeah, how and why did this movie fail again? It should have
been bigger than Titanic based on this image, which should
be spraypainted on the side of a panel van near you if there
is any justice in this universe, and we know there isn't.
dir: Andrew Stanton
‘Old-school science fiction’ is one of those phrases that seems like it’s too oxymoronic to be allowable to be used in common parlance and polite company. Even if it’s meaningless semantically, I’m still going to use it because I think it’s totally applicable. And what do I mean by such a phrase?
Tarzan in space.
Maybe Flash Gordon is a better example of where it’s coming from. At the very least, it’s not robots and star ships and ethical dilemmas about helping lichens on distant planetoids.
It’s just about a guy, called Herman Merman, no, sorry, he’s called John Carter (Taylor Kitsch), and he was on the losing side of the Civil War. The American one, not the one in England, or Liberia. In the pursuit of a cave full of gold, he mysteriously appears somewhere else. Somewhere very much else.
Without him knowing it, he’s turned up on Mars, which the locals call Barsoom. And on Barsoom, there are really tall green four-armed Martians, some other reddish looking ‘white’ human types, and some shapeshifting shitstirrers, who look like whoever they want. It’s too difficult to unpack the racial implications of much of this stuff, so it’s easier to just drop it on the ground, and back away quietly.
At the very least it’s not as obviously retrograde as that other paragon of science fiction, being Dances with Avatars.
John Carter notices something strange about the planet, being the fact that he seems to treat it like one great big trampoline. Someone else comes along and explains to him later that it possibly has something to do with his body being accustomed to the higher gravity of Earth, which means that he’s like some kind of goddamn superhero on Barsoom, jumping like a hypercaffeinated monkey all over the place.
The green many-armed Martians, or Barsoomians, I guess, at first marvel at him, then they want to kill him, then they want to kill him more, then they love him and want to have his babies. Which brings me to another point: their parenting skills leave much to be desired. Sure, I know they’ve got a completely different physiology and such, but their brutal approach to selecting which hatchlings live and which die makes our culture of helicopter parenting and co-sleeping seem positively precious in comparison.
John Carter, of Virginia, doesn’t give a tinker’s dam about the Barsoomian issues going on, being some villain (Dominic West) trying to take over the city of Helium by hook and by crook, because all he wants is to get back to his cave of gold. But once he spots a Princess, in fact a Princess of Mars called Dejah Thoris (Lynn Collins), he gets all patriotic and concerned as to what happens to this red planet. Yes, pussy clearly makes the universe go round, and so it should.
This film is entirely buccaneering and derring-do, and it’s not the poorer for it. Until the end of the flick, which poorly bookends the flick with scenes on Earth dealing with Carter’s nephew Edgar Rice Burroughs (in the clumsiest nod to the author himself of this series of books that probably started a lot of teenage boys off masturbating something like 90 years ago), it’s an enjoyable enough action flick. It definitely harkens back to an earlier time and place (not just chronologically), delivering a flick which is meant to be more fun than thoughtful, more mobile than philosophical. I admit that I was thinking of Flash Gordon a lot while I was watching this, although there’s nowhere near the same level of camp.
A lack of camp isn’t necessarily a good or a bad thing. Some flicks, with camp removed, have nothing. Some flicks, with camp abundant, have nothing. What’s Rocky Horror without camp? Nothing. What’s Glee with camp? Less than nothing. So it’s not an evil in and of itself. The (very slight) camp elements here don’t really affect it in a negative way, though it’s debatable as to what more campiness would have brought to the table.
These kinds of stories are still, by their very nature, pretty fantastical, without any need to be grounded in any way. It’s a Boys Own adventure, and it could have just as easily been some Englishman finding some lost world in the middle of a London taxi cab, or a girl going through a wardrobe and finding a magical world filled with man goats, dozy dotes and talking beavers.
Did I care about the story? Not really. I would defy anyone, man or child, girl or woman to ‘care’ about the story going on here. I barely understood who all these people were, or why the ultimate villain was doing what they were doing, orchestrating events and manipulating all sides of the conflict to some nefarious end.
But it didn’t matter. All we could really care about was whether John Carter gets to kick some ass and score with the hot Martian babe. I seem to think he had more chemistry with the green girl Sona than he did with Dejah Thoris, who is ever so smart and ever so skimpily clad whenever they think they can get away with it. Maybe that hook-up of the three of them getting it on in low gravity in is one of the sequels coming up.
Not that there are likely to be many of those. This is being touted as one of the biggest bombs of all time, and that’s a bit unfair. It’s not an intelligence-insulting shitfest of a film that deserved to be ignored by people in droves. Of stupid crowd pleasing summer Hollywood blockbuster-y type flicks, this is one of the less egregious examples, and it tries to distance itself from the morass of similar flicks by sticking so carefully to the original story that it at least feels like somewhat of a different story than what we’re used to.
That being said, I can see why audiences who equate the words “science fiction movies” with “giant exploding robots in incoherent 2 ½ hour monstrosities” would have been disappointed with this. It’s not mindless enough, and doesn’t have enough explosions, though it has several. And several is not enough.
I was engaged, but it did lose me somewhere along the way, I have to admit. I think it’s reasonably good for what it professes to be, and that’s not a bad thing. Sure, it might look generic as all hell, but for that you can blame Disney, which even took the more bone-headed approach of trying to promote it as “John Carter”, as if that name alone was going to inflame the loins of the masses, and they were afraid of having “of Mars” in the title, in case anyone foolishly thought it was about a guy called John Carter who goes to Mars.
John Carter of Mars it is, and so it should have been. As the title character, Taylor Kitsch does a reasonable job. He’s more than entertaining even at the beginning before he goes to Mars, as a smartass who wants nothing more to do with notions of duty and honour and hygiene. He shares some early, somewhat funny scenes with Bryan Cranston (who seems strange with hair, and bushy hair at that, used to him as we are from Breaking Bad), and mostly manages to be believable in his interactions with people and beings who, thanks to the magic of CGI, aren’t really there.
He doesn’t have to do that much, though, let’s be honest. Lynn Collins does a lot, and probably overdoes a bit of stuff in order to not just seem like a bit of fluff, but those blue glowing eyes do most of the acting. And they act pretty well.
Unfortunately, not for her, but for me, there’s a way of reducing the complexities of a story down to something simple in order to keep it relatable for an audience. In this flick, the conflict between species, and the war to control the city of Helium is reduced to Dejah Thoris not wanting to marry her enemy, despite being told to by her father. When the solution to and source of the conflict in a science fiction flick ends up being an arranged wedding that is solved by a different wedding, your movie instantly becomes more comparable with a Star Wars film, and that’s not a good thing.
If there’s one decision they made in the flick that I thought was, what’s the word I’m looking for, oh yes, retarded, it’s the apparently crucial scene where John is battling a horde of motherfuckers, which is intercut with his memories of burying some people he was quite partial to back during the war. It’s nuts, and it cheapens both elements that they’re poorly trying to interweave. It doesn’t enlarge our understanding of who John Carter was or is motivated by (as if we goddamn care); it just makes the flick look bad, or timid, or dickless, take your pick.
Overall, though, I did not hate this flick, though I was hardly stunned and overthrown by it. It was a pleasant enough experience for two hours, though the ending did make me think I’d wasted my time and money.
We have so little of both, people, in these troubled times. Use accordingly.
6 times the solution to most unwanted wedding scenarios should never be actual weddings out of 10
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“We are strong, because we despise weakness! Let them be crushed, like unhatched eggs!” – the perfect message for Easter, Jebus would be proud – John Carter of Mars
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