When the majority of the buzz surrounding your film is the question of how much it cost, then there's a problem that usually ends with some studio exec's head rolling on the floor. With Walt Disney and director Andrew Stanton noticeably shaken over the numbers being thrown out about the cost of John Carter($250M! $300M!), that type of scrutiny has been their reality for the last month. What was the response? A full force marketing blitz that wreaked of desperation, which ended with a 10 minute sizzle reel of clips that turned out to be the perfect cure for insomnia.
Unfortunately, that footage was an indicator of what was to come, as all of the dollars spent on re-shoots couldn't make John Carter any less of a boring, incomprehensible drag. Edgar Rice Burroughs, the famous adventure author and creator of Tarzan, would himself be up a tree if he saw what has become of his nearly century old Barsoom novels. Based on the first in the series, A Princess of Mars, the film is led by charisma-free Taylor Kitsch, showing none of the snap glimpsed when he played Gambit in the otherwise terrible Wolverine film. His John Carter is an emotionless cypher, a former captain for the Confederate army who can't seem to stay out of trouble. We're introduced to him via his notes, left behind for a young Burroughs(Daryl Sabara) to read. The author began nearly all of his Barsoom novels this way in a clever little twist, as if Carter's space faring adventures were real and he were simply discovering them. After an interminably long setup, Carter is mysteriously whisked away to the planet Mars, where presumably the action begins.
Instead what we actually get is a string of poorly realized characters with convoluted back stories, droning on about some sort of civil war. Known as Barsoom to the natives, the world looks like the bone dry Tatooine segments in The Phantom Menace, only with less pod racing. Or if you like, imagine Waterworld without any water, and that's a pretty good idea of how lame this place is. It's also an indication of the level of convoluted political maneuvering you're likely to face. For some inexplicable reason, Sab Than(Dominic West) of the Zodangans hates the people of Helium, including their badly dressed king(a depressed looking Ciaran Hinds). Yet he wants to marry their feisty and very busty princess, Dejah Thoris(Lynn Collins), in a scheme devised by a bunch of bald headed mystical shapeshifters. Throw in some alien Tharks, a few white apes, and some random mumbo jumbo, and what you have is an action movie so convoluted it makes Inception look like Yogi Bear.It's not as if the plot is all that deep, it's just impossible to tell who anybody is or what their angle is. Nor will you care. Carter arrives and everyone thinks he's some sort of messiah because he can jump really far. Imagine what the Hulk could do in that gravity. Pointless questions like this will infect your brain because nothing happening on screen will hold your interest. At such an exorbitant cost, you'd think that money would have bought something more lively than a bunch of unimpressive lizards and mountain landscapes. Stanton, a Pixar vet who directed no less than the amazing Wall-E, appears tripped up by the source material. He certainly didn't have the same live-action success as his colleague Brad Bird did with Mission Impossible-Ghost Protocol. John Carter too closely resembles many films we've seen already, sadly ironic considering Burroughs novels were the impetus for so many of them.
