Is John Carter a great movie? No. Is it the best movie that Disney has resurrected from Development Hell? Also no! Is it a perfectly acceptable action movie that deserves its cultural reappraisal? That, at least, is true. It is the biggest flop in Disney history, possibly in film history. It cost a fortune and made considerably less than a fortune. Unlike many other flops, it has not made that fortune back in the years since its release, since it still does have that reputation as a terrible movie.
Settle in, kids; there is a lot of plot to be getting on with. Ned (Daryl Sabara) discovers his great-uncle John Carter (Taylor Kitsch) has died. His body is sealed inside a tomb that can only be opened from the inside because sure. Ned says that his great-uncle used to tell him wild stories when he was young. Ned now has his notebook, which tells the story of his great-uncle’s life. His great-uncle was a Confederate veteran roaming the west with a tale of a cave of gold. The US cavalry tries to get his assistance in dealing with the Apache, and he refuses. When he and Powell (Bryan Cranston) end up in a cave together after a stupid incident, he finds the gold—and is transported to a strange new world.
Specifically Mars, or as the natives there call it, Barsoom. There are three factions there. Carter is initially taken prisoner by the Tharks, the Green Martians. They are giant vaguely reptilian creatures with four arms. Their leader is Tars Tarkas (Willem Dafoe), who is impressed with Carter’s ability to jump really high due to being a human on smaller Mars. He is in a struggle with Tal Hajus (Thomas Haden Church). Meanwhile, over in the Red Martians, the cities of Helium and Zodanga have been at war for a thousand years. The leader of Helium, Tardos Mors (Ciarán Hinds), believes he can end the war. The leader of Zodanga, Sab Than (Dominic West), says he will sign a peace treaty and marry Tardos Mor’s daughter, Dejah Thoris (Lynn Collins), but he plans to betray them with a weapon given to him by Matai Shang (Mark Strong) of the Therns.
Space opera is just like this, and that’s part of the problem. Because this is basically all back story. You now know enough to start watching, if you want to fully follow everything that’s going on. Admittedly you can pick it up a lot easier, and it helps that the Red Martians are What If Humans But Red, with Dejah Thoris being your standard Pretty Sci-Fi Lady. Scantily clad, weird markings, fierce warrior. Check, check, and check. (Apparently, in the book, everyone’s nude!) Literally the difference you need to know between Helium and Zodanga is that the people of Helium wear blue and the people of Zodanga wear red. There’s more to it than that, but little of it matters.
Okay, sure, I also like the David Lynch Dune. Fine. I have a high tolerance for space opera. I suspect I’d like the books less, because hooooo boy was Edgar Rice Burroughs racist, but the movie’s fine. It’s a little silly, but space opera is. If it doesn’t let itself be occasionally—and this has Sola (Samantha Morton) basically starting a slow clap at one point—it will be because it’s too self-important. The stories have enormously high stakes, and none of them matter, because it’s all fake anyway.
Barsoom is part of the classic science fiction tradition of Dying Mars. Before it was conceded that, no, there was likely no life there, a belief took hold that the planet was a desert that was slowly dying. Venus was a jungle; Mars was a desert. There’s one river. It’s the only water we see on the planet. Oh, it’s not exactly Arrakis, mind, but still. Dejah Thoris has hopes of using [it doesn’t matter] to restore life to Mars, but the Thark civilization is making choices based on the idea that they have to be tough to survive the desertification and climate change of their planet. So yeah, there’s that.
Lynn Collins is frustrated with the fact that she was told that the failure of the movie was going to reflect poorly on her career. She’s clearly a talented actress; she plays Portia in the Al Pacino movie version of The Merchant of Venice. She’s kept working since then, most notably a dozen or so episodes of The Walking Dead. But her manager told her she needed to essentially go undercover. Meanwhile, Taylor Kitsch was one of our Token White Boys Of The Moment, and it took the failure of his next movie, Battleship, to convince Hollywood that in fact he was not going to be a star.
According to Hollywood tradition, this movie wasn’t called The Princess of Mars because they wanted to attract boys to it and wasn’t called John Carter of Mars because they wanted to attract girls to it, and apparently Hollywood can’t be convinced that girls do, too, watch science fiction. [waves] And so it was left with the exceedingly boring title of John Carter, which could be about anything. What’s more, director Andrew Stanton had a Vision for what he wanted the trailers to be, and audiences weren’t exactly sucked in. Whatever caused the failing, the movie does have a reputation, and it isn’t a good one.
But it’s a perfectly acceptable bit of science fiction nonsense! It’s a very pretty movie. There is a lot of focus put on production design. Okay, a lot of the costumes are silly, though Dejah’s wedding gown is spectacular. But one of the reasons the movie spent eighty years in Production Hell and that the initial planned adaptation would’ve been animated was that the world of Barsoom is a challenging one to reproduce in anything approaching fidelity. It really did take until the world of computer effects in order to make the Tharks and so on. Though apparently Willem Dafoe was in stilts and so forth on the set and enjoyed the challenge.
It’s odd to imagine a world wherein Robert Clampett’s planned adaptation succeeded. It’s not just that he would’ve beaten Disney to an animated feature by a year. It’s not just that there would’ve been a precedent for a studio other than Disney’s making animated features—MGM was planning to release it. It’s also that it was a planned animated feature for adults. Imagine a world wherein the first animated feature for adults was released in 1936. Of course, there’s also the world where it bombed in 1936, I guess.
