Reviews in the Nick of Time: John Carter of M***

Honestly, I have no idea why this movie didn’t do better at the box office.  It’s not perfect, but in the category of action SF movies that make no sense, this one is head and shoulders above the rest.

And it’s got a reason why it doesn’t make any sense.  The book it was based on was written a hundred years ago, when folks didn’t know shit about Mars or space travel or science or anything.  Back in the Nineteen-oughts, people probably thought it was a perfectly sensible thing to carry a sword into an airship combat.  Because you just never knew, did you?

(By contrast, the Transformers films are action SF that don’t make any sense, except they’re written now.  When we should know better.)

Also, Burroughs wrote before Americans had heard of Freud.  Heroes were heroes because, well, they were heroic, and they were honorable because, well, they were heroes.  Villains were villains because they were evil.  No more explanation required.

I should be honest and say up front that I’ve never read A Princess of Mars.  I read Heinlein before I read any of Burroughs’ planetary romances, so I found them quaint and disappointing when I got to them.  (Tarzan, on the other hand, I ate up with a spoon.)

But from the few 0f the Mars books that I read, I have to say that the movie gets Barsoom right in all its colorful, violent, incoherent splendor. It’s a great tribute to the source material.

There are no less than three framing stories, which makes the whole package a little unwieldy and overlong— but each story is done very well, and by the end they all interconnect, so I didn’t lose too much patience, except for the scenes with Carter and his interactions with the U.S. Cavalry, which were completely unnecessary, albeit— once again— well done.  (If they were meant to show Carter’s cynicism, there exist other, less time-consuming ways to do that.)

What surprised me about the film is that, despite the chases and complex plot and the swordplay, it ended up being about family— in fact, it became somewhat of an old-fashioned Victorian family saga.  John Carter’s lost his family in the Civil War, and on Mars he finds a family again.  Some of them are green-skinned and four-armed, but what the hell, they’re a family worth fighting for.  Characters like Tars Tarkas have hidden family connections that are revealed in the course of the film, and which affect the course of the narrative.

Not bad when you consider most of the characters are oviparous.

The villains, by the way, have no families.  They just have followers.  Lots of them.

Taylor Kitsch is a perfectly fine John Carter.  He’s not brilliant in the role, but he gets the job done, and he’s supported by a fine cast, including Willem Dafoe, Bryan Cranston, Dominic West, Polly Walker, James Purefoy, Ciarán Hinds, a startlingly blue-eyed Lynn Collins as Dejah Thoris, and Jon Favreau as “Thark bookie.”  (Surely one of the best credits ever.)

I saw it in 3D, so of course it gave me a headache.  And the polarized 3D spectacles made the image dark, and the indoor scenes very murky— I kept having to take off the 3D specs just to see things.

So see it in old-fashioned 2D.  You won’t miss much, and you’ll be able to actually follow the action.

John Carter of M***.  An old-fashioned Victorian family saga with swordplay, aerial combat, and green-skinned hordes.  Since it’s set on M***, I won’t give it three stars, but three moons.  Deimos, Phobos, and Jon Favreau.