John Carter
Directed by Andrew Stanton
Produced by Jim Morris, Colin Wilson & Lindsey Collins
Screenplay by Andrew Stanton, Mark Andrews & Michael Chabon
Based on A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs
Starring Taylor Kitsch, Lynn Collins, Samantha Morton, Mark Strong, Ciarán Hinds, Dominic West, James Purefoy & Willem Dafoe
Music by Michael Giacchino
Cinematography Dan Mindel
Edited by Eric Zumbrunnen
Production company Walt Disney Pictures
Distributed by Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures
I watched John Carter unironically. I had always been curious about the film despite the bad reviews because I loved the books when I was a kid. I was a member of the last generation to hope that intelligent life, even civilizations, might exist on the red planet. I had just turned 11 when they breathlessly announced that spectographic analysis had revealed water in the Martian atmosphere. I knew that had something to do with rainbows, and I had always been a bit skeptical about rainbows ever since I learned at age six that you could use them to make color TVs. Over the next few weeks it came out that while there was water on Mars, it was next to nothing, far drier than the driest desert on Earth. Mars did not support life.
It was about then that I stopped reading Martian stories about John Carter or Heinlein’s Podkayne and started reading about the stars. (One exception was Bradbury, but I read it as fantasy, rather than science fiction).
Burrough’s Barsoom series receded into my childhood, neglected but not entirely forgotten.
With three different Mars exploration craft due to arrive at the red planet over the subsequent two weeks, I binged a bit on space-related movies—this, along with 2001 and Mars Attacks!
Given how scathing the reviews were, and how badly it bombed at the box office, I was prepared to expect little. Hollywood is cruel to such things—some of the remakes of Sherlock Holmes left me wanting to set my hair on fire and run into the Hadron Large Collider. Hollywood can’t resist making their characters into bad remakes of MTV videos in a largely futile search for hipness and relevance. I was afraid the characters might sound like outcasts from Kangaroo Jack or something.
Andrew Stanton, to his credit, didn’t try to modernize his characters. They were from the 1870s, stiff, formal, and in John Carter’s case, a wild man shaking off the effects of the American Civil War, which his side lost. (I wondered as I watched why they didn’t case Firefly’s Nathan Fillon in the role of Carter—he would have been perfect). Stanton did the right thing, but I think it doomed his film at the box office. The plot was a bit hard to follow, too, and that also was a feature of the original books.
The special effects were excellent, as was the musical score. His representation of Barsoom, the dying magical planet in the sky, was note-perfect. And even the Victorian stiffness of Burroughs’ characters didn’t prevent the actors from doing exactly what Stanton wanted.
I see why it flopped: it wasn’t the right tone for an era of deep cynicism and forced informality, in the despair of end-stage capitalism. But it’s well-enough made that it has an opportunity for redemption in some point in the future, perhaps even about the time humans first step on Mars.