Century-Old Story Not Recharged (on Mars)

John Carter

** out of ****

Directed by: Andrew Stanton

Starring: Taylor Kitsch, Lynn Collins, Willem Dafoe, Samantha Morton and Dominic West

Running time: 132 minutes

Big-budget tentpoles do not get much stranger than the elliptically titled John Carter.

It is based on a century-old 11 volume series of adventure books by Edgar Rice Burroughs that James Cameron and George Lucas have paid homage to in their sci-fi repertoires. The story jumps around between a futuristic Mars – or as it is known in the books, Barsoom – and Reconstruction-era America.

The protagonist is a scruffy Confederate cavalryman (without much of an accent) named John Carter. He is played by Taylor Kitsch, a relative unknown unless you caught his smoldering charisma as Texas fullback Tim Riggins on Friday Night Lights.

Early in the film, Carter is prospecting in the Arizona Territory circa-1868 when he comes across a group of Apache Indians. Fleeing from the tribe, Carter finds a cave full of gold. However, before he can take the treasure, a strange creature wearing a medallion attacks him.

For some reason, the medallion transports Carter to the red planet of Barsoom. There, he adopts Tarzan’s physique and Tigger’s long-jump bounce.

Here comes the exposition: Barsoom is scarcely populated and the numbers keep diminishing. Two cities, Helium and Zodanga, are at war. The leader of Zodanga’s army, Sab Than (Dominic West), has the upper hand and the military might to rule the planet. Instead, he chooses to stop the war as long as he can marry the princess of Helium, Dejah Thoris (Lynn Collins).

But Dejah vanishes from her kingdom and soon tags along with our blandly named American hero and a group of Tharks, which means “skeletal, four-armed Martians with attitude” in Barsoom-ian.

Like the protagonist, the film jumps around plot-wise and tone-wise. The jumbled narrative does little to make its concepts and character strands coherent for audiences that are unfamiliar with the source work.

Kitsch has the gravitas to pull off this dimension-bending hero, although the lackluster script does not offer him the range to prove he is leading actor material. Collins, West and the rest of the ensemble are solid, bringing as much weight as they can muster to the pulpy dialogue. Their stronger individual moments are there, but are scant.

Carter is directed by Andrew Stanton. Stanton is part of Pixar’s team and an Oscar winner for directing Finding Nemo and Wall-E.

Wall-E is an animated space-set epic that also takes place on a large, arid planet many years in the future. That adventure worked because of captivating characters and imaginative plotting. Those aspects are missing from his latest endeavour.

John Carter is one weird sci-fi extravaganza, mostly because it hardly feels like it was worth the effort or the coin, a whopping $250 million. The action is lifeless, the characters flatly defined and the plotting haphazard. It is a fascinating failure that does not work as a whole, even if the cast lifts individual sections to more than they are worth.