John Carter

Well, after the box office performance, Disney obviously knows there’s enormous pent-up demand for a big-budget John Carter of Mars film, so…

I actually have to agree with this, and I love Carter with my 10 year old heart. Unlike the other trash of the week like the Vampire thing or the even the boy wizard…Hunger Games is very very good for a teen novel. It will stand the test of time.
Finally saw the movie, and it was no genre smashing whatever, but I enjoyed the hell out of most of it There was a blandness to it, which I think has to do with the fact that everything in the film has been seen on film before. It really pointed out how much of ERB’s stuff has been ripped off by Hollywood.
Ah well, it will go on my Saturday nap time movie pile…2 hour sci-fi epics that are good to take an afternoon snooze to. Buckaroo, Flash, and Dune are my usual standbys, but this can join them.

I rented this from Netflix but then somehow accidentally returned it unwatched.

I think I’ll take that as a sign for now.

Well… it was bland because Mars was a yellow tinted, blue skied Arizona, and not the orangey purple green world with convoluted spires and dense alien jungle that we know so well from Frezetta drawings. It’s pretty clear to me that if you have 200 mill and want to make a cool John Carter movie you don’t make your warrior aliens look like toothpicks, and for christ sake if they all have four arms let’s see them actually use them on each other in a badass fight and not stand around or get their head chopped off without getting a lick in or two.

The level of cool was much, much lower than it should have been, tired material or not. Wrath of the Titans was so tired they didn’t even put the actors on the poster, and yet the level of badassery in that ate JCom for breakfast.

I was scoffing at leaving off the “From Mars” in the title, and had assumed it was some stupid marketing thing.

But having seen the movie, I was convinced by the final shot that titling the movie simply “John Carter” was a deliberate (and brave) choice by the director. Is it definitely known that it was changed because of focus groups?

Whatever the reason, I thought having the title be simply “John Carter” fit well with the themes of the movie and was used very effectively at the end.

Reasons I liked John Carter (SPOILERS HO!):

  • It is well-written and well-plotted. Some of the dialogue and plot points are very good (details below). None are painfully bad. There was no moment where I said, “This is stupid, why don’t they just…” For a big-budget action movie, this is much smarter than I’m used to. It’s obvious that the filmmakers at least cared about what they were doing.
  • The movie was comfortable showing instead of telling and didn’t assume I was stupid. They didn’t have to spell out in laborious detail why John Carter had super-powers, the point (and backstory) of Sola having no room for more brands, the fact that Dejah Thoris didn’t believe his crazy stories and was just humoring him to escape.
  • It’s basically a superhero movie, and as such has some of the best super-hero action I’ve seen in a movie. The bits where Carter is jumping around on the fliers, the fight with the white apes, snatching a falling Deja Thoris out of the sky months before we got to see Hulk save Iron Man – it was fun to watch, easy to follow, had some humor without being “wacky.”
  • The comedic timing at the beginning of Carter’s escape attempts landing him back in custody. That was tight and funny and helped give him a little bit of character (I admit he didn’t have a whole lot.)
  • There’s actually a lot of humor that works. The Thark leader, bored, upping the ante in the arena.
  • The sunships were gorgeous.
  • That blue energy weapon looked as good as the Green Lantern FX should have.
  • The Tharks - tall and skinny as they should be in a lower-gravity environment. Little details that were both amusing and alien: the scrum to grab an adorable piglet, the way the chiefs clashed horns when they argued, three-handed gestures
  • Dejah Thoris is a smart, active, female character. Not a passive McGuffin. She’s a scientist who actually sounds like a scientist. Her motives are realistically mixed – Is she fleeing marriage for herself or to save her city? She doesn’t let LURVE for John Carter change her goals – she only decides to help him after she’s convinced he can’t/won’t prevent the marriage and/or save her city.
  • Also the way Dejah Thoris dissed her mother-in-law’s wedding dress.
  • his pet dog is The Flash.
  • James Purefoy. Did he steal this movie with the best hostage-taking sequence since Blazing Saddles? Almost.
  • Eileen Page. Did she steal this movie as the alien pretending to be a sweet grandma while explaining his evil plan? Not quite.
  • The ending. I didn’t see it coming (I was all, “You idiot, why are you doing that?!”). And as I said in my previous comment, I loved what they did with the title at the end.

Alas, you were right the first time - it was entirely a marketing decision. A Princess of Mars?!? Chick flick! John Carter of Mars?!? Chicks are turned off! Let’s have something indescribably bland and non-committal and conveys absolutely nothing to the potential audience! Yeah, that’s the ticket!

Oops.

Reading the reasons for your liking the movie (and I overall liked it though I didn’t find it particularly inspired), the one thing that I remember being annoyed with is the self-conscious Dejah Thoris apologizing for wearing a (somewhat) scanty costume when in fact she should have been wearing less!

I agree. Not inspired (except maybe those gorgeous airships), but made with a level of craft, intelligence, and humor that really ought to be the bare minimum for a big-budget action movie, but is sadly a rare treat.

Agreed on all points. This was a much better movie than I expected, even if not a ‘masterpiece’ or whatever. A shame it failed in the way it did. Granted, we had watched Ghost Rider 2 the night before, so it doesn’t take much to bowl us over at this point.

I liked it very much, but some of the film making decisions baffled me. For instance, I might just be a dolt, but I had a very very hard time separating the good guys and bad guys in the fight scenes. I assume the costumes stayed true to the source material, but if ever there was a movie that needed “white Stormtrooper armor” this was it.

How strange, because I was thinking the exact opposite. I thought the red vs. blue cloaks were pretty apparent without having to go so far as Stormtrooper suit to identify. However, they did give a slight nod to the difficultly in being able to easily distinguish when one of the aliens nearly attacked a ‘good guy’ and he held up a fragment of his cape - “See? Blue.”.

It may just be that I’m a dolt.

Just seen this on DVD, and I have to agree that while it’s not a great film it doesn’t deserve the opprobrium it seems to have suffered. It’s entertaining and … I guess the word really is “charming”. It’s light entertainment that reminds me of older genre films from the 50s and 60s.

I was most surprised by the leading man who looked a complete dork in the clips, but had strong presence in the film.

It may be that I’m influenced by seeing it on a small screen. I feel this may be one of those films that has suffered from the ability to do lots of fast digital editing that looks great on a sizeable computer monitor but is mind numbing on a big screen.

(I remember that asteroid film with Bruce Willis suffered terribly from that, it’s the first major film I noticed the syndrome in - absolutely awful to watch in the cinema, but quite normal looking on a small screen.)

I don’t think that’s a problem with John Carter, it was shot and edited very clearly, and steers well clear of chaos cinema and Bayhem.

Film Crit Hulk provided a pretty good diagnosis of John Carter’s problems: the movie’s contantly explaining itself instead of just getting down with the drama and swashbuckling, including roughly 500 different prologues, and the main character who’s supposed to be the audience surrogate has his motivations withheld for over half the movie just for the sake of a pointless reveal, preventing you from engaging and getting swept along.

That’s an excellent analysis, spot on I think.

Shame because the production values are otherwise quite high and this could have been a rollicking old skool genre s-f/fantasy swashbuckler with modern fx.

Watched this over the weekend. It left me feeling ambivalent. It was chaotic yet strangely inert. The characters traveled a bunch but it didn’t feel like they accomplished anything or went anywhere. The pacing felt off. The CGI, art direction and design all looked OK but the money spent was most certainly not on the screen.

I was surprised, considering the talent involved, at how unengaging the story was.

It’s hard to explain why, but I really enjoyed this film quite thoroughly. It wasn’t spectacular in any particular way; definitely one of those “the whole is better than the sum of its parts” things. I think a lot of the appeal for me was, especially in the first half of the film, the high degree of “wow, this is crazy!” experiences that the protagonist was going through. Definitely felt like a fun swashbuckler in many parts.

What’s so hard to explain? It’s spelled Lynn Collins.

That’s a pretty long-winded way of saying that the movie has about half-a-dozen too many plot threads and nearly collapses under its own weight. JC made the classic nerd-movie mistake of over-complicating the fuck outta what should’ve been a straight-forward, gripping adventure yarn. [Hint: if your scifi plot’s more complex than, say, Star Wars or Aliens, then it’s probably too damn complicated for its own good.] Add to that a relatively uninteresting protagonist and that’s a lot of drag on the film’s narrative momentum.

I liked JC - heck, I even liked the first trailer - but the first act is too slow & boring (does anyone give a shit about ERB or any of the pre-Mars stuff?), the second act is too meandering with the wandering-in-the-desert bits, leaving the third act to feel too abrupt and rushed to have much impact. They should’ve jettisoned most of the Earth-bound bits and probably most of the stuff with the Therns (even though Mark Strong was great), so they could focus on the “man wakes on Mars, finds he has super-powers, meets pretty warrior-princess-scientist, fights bad dudes” bits.

It’s an honor to have you on Qt3, Mr. Bay!