John Carter (2012)
From the director of Wall-E and Finding Nemo. I was pretty excited about this one. Sure, the marketing has been pants, but that's not all that surprising. But I was sure that, with Andrew Stanton at the helm, this would be a lot better than the marketing made it out to be.
The movie opens with voiceover narration. It starts off by telling us that Mars has life on it, that there are two groups at war on the planet and then goes into more detail about the conflict in a way that I couldn't quite piece together on the spot. We see McNulty, I mean Dominic West, get into an airfight between his bug-shaped craft and a different bug-shaped craft. The attacking craft shoots out ominous blue rays and, at the end of this scene, everyone asides from McNulty has been vapourised into blue smoke. Some creepy guys with glowing blue eyes tell McNulty that they want to give him this blue weapon and that with it he will be able to rule the planet. He smiles, presumably because he didn't like any of the people he was fighting alongside before.
We then see John Carter wandering around on Earth in the late 1800s. He sends out an urgent telegram sending for a relative of his. When the relative arrives he is informed that John Carter is already dead and that the estate will belong to him in 15 years. For those 15 years he needs to run the estate and to guard John Carter's body which, per John's instructions prior to death, has been sealed in a large tomb without any of the typical embalming and the like.
The relative then starts reading John Carter's diary which appears to be directly addressed to him. Now we start on the story of John Carter in search of a cave full of gold. Meanwhile there are military forces in America fighting against the Apache Indians. John Carter is a tough fighter, but he has absolutely no interest in getting involved in this misguided skirmish. The local militia tries to forcibly recruit him, he escapes and to cut a long story short he finds the cave, gets into a struggle with some kind of human-shaped alien person and gets teleported to Mars.
Now I'm not going to say that this stuff wasn't entertaining. Certainly the last bit with him escaping from the army recruiters was pretty good fun. However, this was a very convoluted way to start the film. Things seem to happen in chunks and this doesn't really change once the film gets going.
The positive side of things is this. "John Carter" looks very pretty in a way that the marketing did not really make clear (probably because they didn't want to give away all the best visuals in the trailer, so fair enough). It also has a number of interesting ideas. The weird dog-thing that's been appearing in the trailers makes for quite a sweet little companion, for example. John Carter discovers on Mars that with very little effort he can send himself flying into the air and spends a while upon his arrival working out how to just walk normally on the surface. This super-jumping ability makes John Carter seem like a kind of superhero, especially when we discover that his bypassing of gravity also seems to have, bizarrely, given him superhuman strength. The dog-thing impresses us because when John Carter tries to jump away from it, it is able to run faster on land than he can jump. It scampers up vast flights of stairs and reacher the spot where John Carter means to land before he finishes his jump. That was pretty cool.
The previously mentioned "blue weapon" also involves some very cool effects. The bit that everyone shrugged at in the trailer where some blue lights spread out on the ground is actually part of a much wider and more impressive visual effects theme surrounding the mysterious bad guys' powerful technology.
Sadly, on the negative side, the characters feel pretty thin. It's not that they don't have traits that ought to flesh out their characters, but these traits always end up coming off as yet another plot element. Perhaps the only character who actually feels real is John Carter himself. I have to give the lead at least some credit because he genuinely carries the movie. Within the aforementioned opening scenes we see that John Carter is a sort of Han Solo-esque anti-hero. He's basically just interested in money (and, judging from his house when his relative finds it, old artefacts), but he still has a heart of gold and will not leave someone stranded. I had rather more trouble believing that he had already been married with children back on Earth, but the actor is 30, so perhaps it's not quite so odd (particularly for the era).
Perhaps the most annoyingly blank character is McNulty, I mean Dominic West, who avoids being the typical moustache-twirling British bad guy by having barely any expression whatsoever. If I weren't a massive fan of "The Wire" I'm not sure I'd have believed that this guy could be the central figure in a thrilling TV series. Meanwhile the some even more powerful baddies that Dominic West's character is working for, led by Mark Strong, are intentionally emotionless and they actually work pretty damn well as baddies. Unfortunately, perhaps the coolest scene with these bad guys, involves them holding John Carter hostage and forcing him to listen to them explain their whole plan, James Bond style.
The main criticism of this film? There's too much talk.
Look, I know that might sound odd. Surely the best way to make an intellectually engaging movie rather than a mindless action flick is to use plenty of dialogue. The problem is, as I said before, the characters are thin. The dialogue doesn't serve to flesh out the characters, but rather to hammer home the plot points.
With the attempts to wow me with spectacle, the characters who aren't fleshed out properly and the awkward central romance, this reminded me of "Avatar" (which I really didn't like at all). However, I couldn't help but feel there was something better about this film than Avatar. Thinking about it, I'd have to note that Avatar bored me DURING the action sequences. What's great about "John Carter" is that part of the reason why I was so annoyed by the long talky bits was because the action bits are actually genuinely exciting. The action sequences were really good and by that I don't just mean that they looked good. I mean that they engaged me, entertained me and made me genuinely concerned about the outcome.
Yes, you need a certain amount of exposition to make action scenes engaging and yes, this film has that much. But there was so much more dialogue that simply felt superfluous. I reckon the film could be at least twenty minutes shorter without losing any emotional impact whatsoever. Were there elements here that could have been improved? Yes definitely. Far too much. "John Carter" was a bit of a mess and could have done with being shorter, more streamlined and the characters needed to feel like real people rather than plot points.
C-