"John Carter" (2012) dir. Andrew Stanton

Originally titled "Shawn Carter" but Jay-Z bailed at the last minute. Hov!

 When you saw the trailers for "John Carter," you may have thought, "Wow, that looks pretty similar to 'Avatar' and a million other other sci-fi flicks." Then some bespectacled neck beard in a Battlestar Galactica t-shirt jumped out of a bush and said something like, "Mmmm, yes, well you see the 1917 pulp novel "A Princess of Mars" by Edgar Rice Burroughs is pretty much what inspired everything from 'Flash Gordon' to 'Star Wars' to 'Avatar' so, yeaaaah," while pushing up his glasses and farting. Hopefully, you punched said nerd and continued on your merry way to see "John Carter."

The other narrative surrounding this movie is how badly media critics bashed it before it was even being screened. It cost a kajillion dollars. Mars is stupid. Those aliens look ridiculous, etc etc. It reminded me a lot of how everyone flipped out about how much over budget "Waterworld" was way before it came out and how terrible it was going to be. You know what? "Waterworld" is fucking awesome. My dad took me to see it when it came out. I must have been about 11 and was eager to see what all the fuss was about. Well, it delivered big time and I was way into it. In all seriousness, if you never saw "Waterworld" as a kid or you haven't seen it in a long time, watch it again. They don't make movies like that anymore. A totally go-for-broke, post-apocalyptic survival story almost completely shot on the ocean. That is ballsy, man.

This nerd wrote a spot-on rant defending "John Carter" for similar reasons:
"JOHN CARTER is not a debacle; it's an earnest attempt to evoke wonder, and it largely succeeds despite its narrative missteps. Maybe you don't agree. That's fine. But choose your fucking battles, people. Having it out for a film like JOHN CARTER hurts the art form; it makes it harder for our best directors to follow through on their dreams. For a long time, BLADE RUNNER was considered a horrendous flop; now, it's one of the most influential films of my lifetime. No one at Fox was proud of THE ABYSS, but I'm pretty sure at some point it'll be considered Cameron's masterpiece. In any event, register your disappointment and move on, and save your vitriol for the films that deserve it."

Yeah! What he said! Anyways, I was excited to see "John Carter" because A) I love my sci-fi action movies B) it's directed by the same guy who made "Wall-E" and C) it stars my boy Taylor Kitsch aka Tim Riggins from the Best TV Show Ever (Trademark) "Friday Night Lights whose charm can only be described with one word: laconic. Even still, my expectations were not especially high, probably due to all the mediocre reviews. Because of this, "John Carter" surprised the hell out of me by being pretty damn exceptional.


I was impressed by how the movie does not insult its audience's collective intelligence. It chucks you into the deep end with no water wings. I really dig that. Things get explained gradually over the course of the 2 hour running time instead of it all being spelled out for you up front as to who all these different groups of Mars folk are and why they're fighting and how our hunky, I mean, uh, heroic protagonist gets tossed into the middle of all of it and why he can jump really, really far and no one else can.

Visually, "John Carter" is stunning. Andrew Stanton made the very wise (and expensive, I suppose) choice to shoot tons of real locations for the movie and blend it with tasteful CG instead of making one giant green screen turd of a movie like most people do these days. It pays off big time because this Mars landscape actually feels like a real, dusty and generally unpleasant place. The set design is also similarly lush and impressive. The 2 warring humonoid groups on the planet have a sort of ancient Rome meets steampunk (lol) look to their clothing and machinery, which I know sounds really silly, but it looks cool. The level of detail on their airships, which fly on light (duh), is insane. And the four-armed alien race that befriend our boy JC actually look really well rendered and reasonably lifelike. It all makes for an overall immersive moving going experience and it's nice to see that all that money at least went to something that turned out very high quality.

There's one scene in particular that really sold me on the movie, but I feel like it will only register with people who regrettably devoted way too much time to watching "Lost" and appreciated the scores of "Star Trek" (2009), "Up" and "Super 8." I'm talking about the modern king of sappy, emotive scores: Michael Giacchino. Without giving too much away, our boy JC decides to stay behind and take on a horde of dickhead aliens himself in order to let his crew escape and the score suddenly gets SUPER Giacchino-y ("Lost" 4th season spoiler warning, also may cause weeping) and there are flashbacks that fill out his backstory a bit and finally give the movie some depth. I, of course, ate this right up. Loved it.


It's unfortunate that everyone decided to hate on this movie because it's actually quite good, even to someone who has pretty high standards for action blockbusters. It's also surprisingly "hard sci-fi" for a Disney film, which I guess perhaps contributes to the backlash. Anyways, I'll always defend the hell out of "Waterworld" and I'll probably do the same for "John Carter."