"Planet of the Apes." Terrible beer. The Famous-Bowl-ification of pop culture. "Kony 2012." Why Pixar is great. Why girls have decided being pigeon-toed is fashionable. Why Topher Grace will inspire tens of fanboys to chase fan-edit greatness. And why "John Carter" recalls the greatest triumphs of "Krull" and the mild failures of "Temple of Doom." Hope you’re ready to go leaping all over the place, because that’s what today’s show does.
"John Carter" is overpowering, joyously unhinged pulp. This is its greatest strength and, in a storytelling sense, a bit of a weakness.
The film is the live-action debut of Pixar superstar director Andrew Stanton (and a victim of one of the most tone-deaf movie-marketing campaigns I've ever seen). It adapts material from the first few books in Edgar Rice Burroughs' romantic, episodic sword-and-aliens series, set on an apocryphal Mars. Among the filmmakers who've drawn inspiration from these stories are James Cameron (for "Avatar") and George Lucas (for various elements of "Star Wars") -- leaving "John Carter" in the odd cultural position of finally committing to film a story that hugely successful blockbusters have plundered for decades.
Mostly, Stanton and co-writers Mark Andrews and Michael Chabon stick to the spine of the first book, 1917's "A Princess of Mars" (first serialized in 1912) -- telling the story of Carter (Taylor Kitsch), a burned-out former Civil War Virginia cavalryman who hides in a cave and suddenly finds himself teleported to the Red Planet (or, as the locals call it, "Barsoom").
Once there, Carter is shaken out of his doldrums by a multicultural conflict that smashes together at least four separate warring alien tribes. The players include towering four-armed green Tharks (led by Willem Dafoe in outstanding digital monster makeup), two separate kingdoms of tattooed humans, and a mysterious bald race of Machiavellian, technologically advanced jerks (led by Mark Strong). Oh, and a slug-dog that can run 200 miles per hour. And a warrior-scientist princess (Lynn Collins) fleeing a politically expedient wedding.
Stanton is gleefully committed to letting this universe run wild on a big screen; "John Carter"'s best qualities are its gigantic, densely packed, slightly loopy world-building and its unironic senses of humor and fun. Somewhere around the time the slug-dog zipped through the desert while John Carter (who can super-leap in the lower Martian gravity) flew a steampunk-looking sled between the legs of a giant walking city after escaping a bald guy armed with spidery blue nanotech who gloated about manipulating a metal-bikinied genius into an arranged marriage, I leaned over to my seatmate and whispered, "This is '80s-fantasy crazy -- like 'Krull' -- only with a $250-million budget and done really well."
(I won't even get into the fact that all this lunacy is wrapped inside a frame story involving Edgar Rice Burroughs himself, a diary and a mysterious mausoleum.)
My only real beef with the film is sort of tied into that same wildness, however. Stanton has so much fun breathlessly smashing Burroughs' ideas together like the world's smartest seven-year-old boy that I never quite found a place to hang my hat. Planet-hopping set-pieces and characters and lingo and exposition and subplots fly by until the movie basically plays like an action-packed, overstuffed travelogue. I was never confused -- which is quite a feat, honestly -- but I'm also not sure I could easily identify the movie's emotional core, which is the sort of thing at which Pixar directors usually excel. Kitsch is adequate, but if he'd been slightly more riveting as the world-weary lead, maybe I'd have a clearer sense of purchase.
Still, "John Carter" is too wickedly strange not to recommend. Movies this expensive usually play it much safer than this. ______
Walker (founder/editor of the legendary blaxploitation and kung-fu 'zine BadAzzMofo) emerges, unsurprisingly, as an enthusiastic "Enter the Dragon" scholar. _____
