ScreenFix

This past weekend I had the pleasure of going to see John Carter. To be quite honest I did not really know what to expect from the film. I was only tangentially aware of the John Carter franchise but it is difficult to be a fan of science fiction literature and not have at least heard the name in passing. I sat down with my oversized soda in a theater filled with more ten year-olds than I had expected, and after double checking that I hadn’t stumbled into a Lorax theater by accident, I prepared myself for whatever was going to happen on screen in front of me.

The fact that John Carter pulls from such an old intellectual property is both a blessing and a curse. It turns out that everyone is vaguely familiar with the story of John Carter. John Carter is a former Confederate soldier who is transported to Mars, called Barsoom by its inhabitants, while looking for gold. There he is thrust into a global conflict, that in many ways strongly mirrors the American Civil War and conflict with Native Americans. He throws in with the alien race called the Tharks. While gaining respect from the native people and honing his newfound strength (the gravity on Mars is weaker so he gains super human abilities) he learns about the conflict and accidentally falls for the princess of one of the ‘red man’ martian civilizations. Ultimately he stops running from the role of hero that is being thrust upon him and takes up the mantle of ‘"Dotar Sojat” or Champion of the Tharks. The plot probably sounds at least a little familiar because Burroughs was an influential author and ‘A Princess of Mars’ became the basis for many more modern stories.

One of the biggest problems with the movie is an unfortunate consequence of being based on a piece of intellectual property that has been around for so long. The plot is rather predicable. The princess and the stranger fall in love. He doesn’t slink away and stands up for what is right. There is a big battle and the good guys win. ‘Princess of Mars’ was a huge influence on a whole generation of writers. Although the story is now fairly cliche, when Burroughs wrote the stories it was original. He, Verne, Tolkien, and many prolific authors of that time period were the literary founding fathers of what are now the science fiction and fantasy genres. Making a new movie based off of the original franchise was more than likely going to result in a final product with a predictable story, and in fact did.. Having said that, I think that writer/director Andrew Stanton did a fantastic job of making it as engaging as he could.

The movie did many things right. What really “wow’d” me was the graphics used for the Tharks. If you have not gotten to see an image of them, they are green humanoids with four arms, no nose, and tusks coming out of their face. While we haven’t quite gotten to point where people can be flawlessly recreated using computer graphics, I think we have finally hit a point where animated aliens can exist in the universe of a film without drawing attention to the fact that they are animated in the slightest. Furthermore the style of the entire movie, from the giant moving city to the flying ships, is fantastic. I am always concerned that movies based off of such old franchises will try to match their aesthetic feel and end up feeling old even if they are supposed to be set in the future. While John Carter’s martians definitely have a Rome-Meets-Wild-West aesthetic to them, it did not feel out of place. Personally one of my biggest complaints was that, like many movies based of books, there simply wasn’t enough time to linger in the world and fully flesh out the story to its full potential.

It is quite probable that John Carter won’t perform well in the box office. It is already being shown up by second week animated kid’s movie The Lorax. That is really unfortunate because even with its pitfalls I think John Carter is a strong movie. It doesn’t fall into many of the easy traps of cutting out flavor or rushing through important plot points and really did keep me on the edge of my seat. It is certainly enjoyable and I do recommend seeing it. My biggest hope for John Carter is that it does well enough that Hollywood continues to delve deeper into the library of classic science fiction for inspiration and stops making shallow sequels for movies based off of board games.