Edgar Rice Burroughs's Barsoom series of novels suffers from the Tomorrowland problem. When that part of Disneyland opened in 1955, it was focused on the wondrous technology of the future. It had one problem, though, and that is that the future becomes the past. Either you constantly change the land or you start to look foolish. Since constant change is expensive, you eventually have to stop looking forward—instead going meta and look not to the past or the future, but instead at how the past thought about the future. Then you eventually trash all of that, put in a crappy car ride, then just kind of ignore the theme.
OK, so the analogy to Tomorrowland only goes so far; but it still have some merit. Old science fiction often has the problem: the future catches up to the story. When H.G. Wells published War of the Worlds in 1898, the germ theory of disease was relatively new and startling, and it wasn't hard to imagine that it would be new and startling to an invading alien race as well (oops, spoiler alert I guess). However, by the time Tom Cruise battled those aliens in 2005, it was hard to imagine aliens who were smart enough to launch an invasion but were unaware of that particular hazard.
Similarly, Burrough's Barsoom novels presented a fantastical vision of what Mars might be like, but one that didn't seem entirely ruled out in a time when people were still discussing apparent canals visible on the red planet. Since then, we've learned an awful lot about Mars. Plus, we've seen humans operating in low-gravity environments. Let's just say that Burroughs didn't exactly get it right.
As a result, fans of the novels—I'm not exactly a fan, but all of my literary idols growing up were, so I read them anyway—have awaited John Carter with a fair amount of curiosity as to how such issues would be handled. Writers Andrew Stanton (also directing), author Michael Chabon (Wonder Boys, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay) , and Mark Andrews took a slightly unexpected road.
Essentially, they didn't deal with it. The Mars of the movie is the Mars we see in the night sky. It isn't an alternate reality Mars, it isn't a different planet around a different star as some thought might be the case when “of Mars” was elided from the title. In the books, it is our Mars—so in the movie, it is our Mars. Similarly, no new explanation is given for why being on Mars allows John Carter to jump hundreds of feet into the air (after all, on Mars he'd weigh twice as much as on the moon, and we saw how far Neil Armstrong could jump) or to be super strong (lower gravity isn't going to make it easier to break iron chains). He was as he was in the book, so he is in the movie.
The other decision was to not go the way of Tomorrowland. At no point does the movie wink at the audience as if to say, “We know this is silly, but isn't it interesting what people thought at the time?”
Your enjoyment of this movie is going to be impacted heavily by how agreeable those two decisions were. Personally, I admire the second; I'm not sure sure about the first.
As in the novels, John Carter (Taylor Kitsch) is a Civil War veteran prospecting in the Southwest when he has to hide in a cave to avoid Apaches looking to kill him (Stanton and friends may not have explained the super strength but they did come up with a better reason for this than simply Apaches being pugnacious). One thing leads to another, and he ends up in possession of a medallion that shocks him—and when he awakens, he finds himself on Mars. He quickly discovers he is able to leap tall buildings (actually, eventually he'll leap tall cities) in a single bound, and so on.
Mars has three sentient races, all in conflict with each other for diminishing resources on a dying planet. The Thark are green (Burroughs definitely wasn't shy about using skin color to indicate general dispositions), have four arms, and are the first to find John Carter, whom they promptly take as a hostage. But his super strength and leaping ability impresses the martial tribe, so he's enlisted to fight for them.
The Zodangans are human in appearance, and are at war with the red martians (in the movie, not so much red as red-tinted) centered in the city of Helium. When Carter falls in love with Dejah, the princess of Helium (portrayed by Lynn Collins), who is resisting a forced marriage to Sab Than, leader of the Zodangans (Dominic West), things then fall into pretty standard action movie fair. Strong man kills people to save damsel in distress. You don't need an explanation of how that plays out. Though it should be noted that this is a Disney movie, so Dejah is clothed (a despicable betrayal of the source material).
There is nothing at all objectionable about John Carter. In the end, though, there is nothing that really sets it apart, either. You can mix and match movies and have a good sense of things. It's Conan meets Avatar. It's Spartacus meets Tarzan (which, by the way, was also written by Burroughs).
The battles are epic in scope, even if at times the CGI is a little cartoony. The movie may not explain why one-third gravity means 1,000-foot jumps, but it also doesn't explain why everything still falls at the same speed as on Earth, giving everything a certain weightless feel that undercuts any sense of peril.
The acting performances certainly aren't great, but they aren't awful. If I could accept Marc Singer 30 years ago in The Beastmaster (a movie in which the best acting was done by a pair of ferrets), I can accept Cieran Hinds chewing on some scenery here, and Taylor Kitsch blandly moving from set piece to set piece.
Two of Pixar's luminaries made their live action debuts in the last few months. Andrew Stanton here, and Brad Bird with Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol. If they're keeping score on a chalkboard at their Emeryville campus, Brad Bird gets the point—but Andrew Stanton did not embarrass himself. While I can't say that John Carter put me over the moon, it is one of those affairs where I can't really argue with anybody who disagrees and said they simply had a good time with something that wasn't trying to engage brain cells. I do wish though, that Stanton and Chabon had shown more interest in my brain cells.
John Carter is a Walt Disney Pictures release.
Wide theatrical release Friday, March 9.
Directed by Andrew Stanton
Screenplay by Andrew Stanton, Michael Chabon, and Mark Andrews
Starring: Taylor Kitsch, Lynn Collins, Dominic West, Mark Strong, Willem Dafoe
Running time: 132 minutes
Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of violence and action
Alex's Rating: 5 out of 10
