John Carter
Let me tell you a story about a man with the initials JC. True of heart, he came from the heavens and used his superhuman powers to unite a humble people, giving them the strength to stand up to the tyranny of an all-powerful empire. The Good Book isn’t the only text to be shamelessly plundered in John Carter, the live action debut from WALL-E director Andrew Stanton. Among the pilfered are Gladiator, Conan, Star Wars and Dune, and towering above all these appropriations is the blue stereoscopic shadow of Avatar, that modest art-house hit directed by the other JC.
Stanton’s film starts promisingly, despite the been-there-done-that vibe, with a breezy and cheerfully daft first half-hour that sees the title character, an AWOL American Civil War Confederate officer played by serviceable beefcake Taylor Kitsch (not to be confused with Kitsch Tailor, the film’s costume designer), evading a scalping from some red injuns only to be inexplicably transported to the red planet. (Gloomy planet is more accurate, thanks to the pointless 3D specs that come with the ticket.) It takes Carter a while to figure out he’s not in Virginia anymore but on Mars (or Barsoom as the natives call it), despite being captured and adopted as a mascot by a tribe of 12ft tall, six-limbed green men called the Thark – imagine the Hindu god Ganesha after a nose job and a crash diet.
This nice-but-dim fish out of water soon settles into his new home, though, pulling himself a princess (Lynn Collins), making friends with the wildlife (the Thark equivalent of a Labrador takes a shine to him), and discovering that Mars’s weak gravitational pull gives him the kind of jumping prowess that Lee Majors had to fork out six billion dollars for back on Earth. Conforming to Hollywood movie rules, Carter's noble savage captors are soon worshipping at his all-American hero feet and following him into battle against an evil oppressor (see The Last of the Mohicans, The Last Samurai, etc, etc.); villain duties fall to Dominic West and his henna tattoo-sporting humanoid army.
It’s at this point that Stanton’s initially charming but unwieldy derring-do adventure begins to come undone. There’s something rather unpleasant in the way our likeable protagonist, a gravel-throated pacifist and Civil War conscientious objector, morphs into a bloodthirsty warmonger. (In this respect, Carter’s spiritual self-discovery is like Avatar’s Jake Sully’s in reverse.) This is best summed up in an overwrought sequence where Carter slays scores of charging Tharks while flashing back to the murder of his wife and child at the hands of the Union, which manages to be both distasteful and hilariously preposterous.
Calling a sci-fi yarn set on Mars preposterous may be a moot point, but the distinct lack of peril in the increasingly tedious action sequences is a major problem. That Carter’s superhuman abilities increase and decrease with no discernible internal logic is also frustrating – the way he effortlessly skips through the air brings to mind the weightless effects that crippled the similar jumpy-powered Hulk and its sequel. Strange that convincing CGI and coherent storytelling would be the main stumbling blocks for a filmmaker who learned his trade with Pixar; Stanton made us believe in the love between a trash compactor and a flying iPod, but he can't convince that this loincloth-clad he-man can leap tall buildings in a single bound. [Jamie Dunn]