Before anyone cries foul and tries to patronize this movie for being too much like some of the “Star Wars” prequels or another science fiction film series, know that the source material for Disney’s “John Carter” was written in 1917 under the title “A Princess of Mars” by Edgar Rice Burroughs (also the author of the “Tarzan” series), which means that the science fiction stories that it supposedly ripped off of were actually inspired by this story.
Now that that’s out of the way, we can talk about Disney’s adaptation of it all. It’s been marketed to nearly no end, and it almost feels out of place in early March, this very much being a blockbuster kind of film, but it’s good to see that we can actually get these kinds of films any time of year.
The thing about these kinds of films, as usual, is that they often feel just a little vapid or mindless, but that’s kind of the reason we go to them: we just want to melt into the theater’s seat and watch a civil war of epic proportions go down on Mars (I mean Barsoom).
Thankfully, this is both a great action flick with some tense and awesome battle scenes, but it also feels rich with lore and has a sort of poetic beauty to it all. All told, these two elements combine to make Disney’s latest live-action movie a pretty interesting film indeed.
The film primarily follows John Carter, a 19th century Civil War veteran played by “Friday Night Lights” star Taylor Kitsch, who, through a somewhat comical string of events, finds himself stranded in the middle of a red desert surrounded by skinny, 6-limbed green creatures known as the Green Martians.
It’s a romantic plot at its core, and does seem to be pretty cheesy at times, but it lends itself to some epic fight scenes and a wonderful pair of villains played by Dominic West and Mark Strong.
The visuals in this film are fantastic and wonderful to behold. It’s an excellent adaptation of Burroughs’ original work and captures the grandeur of the landscape of Barsoom effortlessly (well, aside from that massive budget of $250 million) and the fight scenes are all very well-choreographed, especially the one featured in the trailers with the Green Martian arena.
The Green Martians feel believable and they inhabit the world as if they were truly alive, making for oddly humane aliens. All of the Martian cities that John travels through during his adventure also feel very grandiose and epic.
Despite the best efforts of translating the nearly century old story to the big screen, the performance of the actors in this film just falls flat.
Taylor Kitsch does a fine job of playing the action hero except for those parts when he, talks. A lot of the time, his voice doesn’t fit the leaping killing machine that he was just minutes earlier.
Bryan Cranston is in the movie for a total of ten minutes, and it really just goes to show that his acting chops are so unbelievable that they nearly steal the film in this regard.
I mentioned earlier that Mark Strong and Dominic West made for very good villains, but this is more a result of their actions and less how they’re portrayed.
Strong plays a pretty decent bad guy in nearly every movie he’s, and it’s really no different here; he just doesn’t stand out.
I loved Dominic West in “The Wire” and thought he was perfect for the part; it fits his antagonistic persona well. But if we want to talk about who takes the cake for the worst performance in the film, it has to be Lynn Collins as Dejah.
The relatively poor dialogue she’s given is delivered pretty badly overall, and I feel like I have no reason to believe she’s a great warrior when she appears on screen. Perhaps it was necessary to translate her character to film, but it was just too distracting to overlook.
If not for the pretty subpar acting in the film, I’d believe “John Carter” to be a pretty solid adaptation of the seminal sci-fi novel. As it stands, however, the performances bring down an otherwise beautiful (and far over budget) film that will likely not become Disney’s next cash cow like they clearly expect it to be.
