From Academy Award(R)-winning filmmaker Andrew Stanton comes “John Carter”–a sweeping action-adventure set on the mysterious and exotic planet of Barsoom (Mars). “John Carter” is based on a classic novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs, whose highly imaginative adventures served as inspiration for many filmmakers, both past and present. The film tells the story of war-weary, former military captain John Carter (Taylor Kitsch), who is inexplicably transported to Mars where he becomes reluctantly embroiled in a conflict of epic proportions amongst the inhabitants of the planet, including Tars Tarkas (Willem Dafoe) and the captivating Princess Dejah Thoris (Lynn Collins). In a world on the brink of collapse, Carter rediscovers his humanity when he realizes that the survival of Barsoom and its people rests in his hands.
John Carter is a character that has been around for quite a long time he first popped up in the novel ‘A Princess on Mars’ penned by Edgar Rice Burroughs 100 years ago and to my knowledge the movie has been in the making from studio to studio for over the lasts twenty or so years so when Disney took over the rights in 2007 to give it a crack and a whopping rumored 250 million dollar budget well you would think you would walk out of the cinema impressed… Well maybe not.
I’ve sat on writing this for a while as I honestly wasn’t to sure on what direction I would go, but after much deliberation I’ve basically decided it could have been a bit better, well in fact it could have been a bucketload better. To look at the positives of the film though the performances are well balanced and fantastic with that they had to work with. Taylor Kitsch in the title role of John Carter I thought did a brilliant job and same with the ever so beautiful Lynn Collins (her eyes are incredible) the only things that really let all the actors down was some rather terrible dialog. I will say the opening 20 minutes and the final 20 minutes were fantastic.
Into the negative which there is only one major negative in the whole film and thats the absolute mess of plot/script at some stages there was so much going on I wasn’t quite sure what was happening and with the shocking dialog that didn’t really help either. I just found it pretty hard to follow and they could have easily made it a bit more linear but obviously with a production of this magnitude that just wouldn’t happen.
In addition to the positives the score to the film was brilliant and the CGI environments were incredible obviously you can see where a good chunk of that 250 million dollar budget went, I just wish they invested a tad more time on the script. John Carter had so much potential as it’s a pretty damn impressive story and for this little sci-fi head it ticked a lot of boxes but in the end overall it was a complete fail.
John Carter is now in cinemas I give this film 2 out of 5 stars.