John Carter

John Carter has had a long, long road to the big screen: originally published by Tarzan author Edgar Rice Burroughs (as Under the Moons of Mars, and later, Princess of Mars) in a series of pulp magazines in 1912 (under a pseudonym, for fear of ridicule), work on the film first began in the early 1930s, when it was conceived as an animated feature under Looney Tunes director Robert Clampett; more recently, the material passed through the hands of directors John McTiernan, Robert Rodriguez, Kerry Conran, and Jon Favreau.

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The supporting cast, however, picks up the slack: especially impressive is Collins, who’s the kind of fierce and fierce-minded heroine that’s usually missing from films like this. She’s not the usual damsel in distress, but she’s also ravishing in some skimpy Martianwear that harkens back to Princess Leia’s getup in Jabba’s Palace. Willem Dafoe and Samantha Morton provide voices to the Tharkan leader and a benevolent Thark, the two most sympathetic characters in the movie; Bryan Cranston is fun in what amounts to a short Earthbound cameo.

Too often in these films (fantasy/sci-fi) we see a clash of undefined superpowers that is expected to draw suspense, but fails to do so. Example: Carter has to make a climactic ‘impossible’ jump, but because we have no reference as to what he is capable of, the scene fails to engage us. On Earth, we know the stakes: those roofs seem pretty far apart, that guy is holding a gun, the consequence is death. In this fantasy, we need the writers to provide that information: show the limits of the jumping abilities in an earlier scene, and the consequences if he falls here. Carter instinctively “looks down” before the jump, as if the writers wanted to relay the danger, but we’ve seen him fall great distances before with no damage.

Burroughs’ serials and novels all went by different names, but there’s one thing they had in common: “of Mars”, which has been shorn from this film’s title in an effort to appeal to a wider audience (and possibly, in reaction to last year’s disappointing Cowboys & Aliens). Ultimately, this is a film is caught between fully embracing the pulp nature of the material, and obscuring the more genre-specific material for mass appeal to justify its massive ($250 million) budget. Still, it’s plenty fun.

John Carter was shot in two dimensions and converted to 3D in post-production. While many of the CGI elements look fine, the majority of the film looks dim and murky and only vaguely better than The Phantom Menace conversion, which has the excuse of being originally released more than a decade ago. I was pretty shocked to see a level of brightness and clarity on my computer during this ten-minute 1080p YouTube clip (which is also one of the better sequences in the film) that was sorely missing from the theatrical version.