A Celebration of “John Carter” — Followed by Depression

This was previously posted on my personal blog on April 4th, 2012, shortly after John Carter was in theaters. While you’re here, please check out the Midwest Film Nerds (also available on iTunes and Stitcher Radio) and follow Alex on Twitter.

So, earlier this year, I listed off my 10 most anticipated movies of the year. Deep down in the “honorable mentions” you’ll find this:

John Carter (March 9th) – Highly stylized, this is Pixar director Andrew Stanton’s first live-action film, it should be quite interesting to compare to Brad Bird’s Mission: Impossible from 2011.

The closer John Carter came to being released, I became more and more eager to see the movie. If I had written this article in the last few weeks of February, John Carter would have easily replaced a few of the films on my list including The Hobbit and The Great Gatsby. Finally, I have seen it (in 2D only, mind you), in its third and, most likely, final week in the theater. At the moment the film ended, I felt utterly depressed with the fact that we’ll never see John Carter: The Gods of Mars.

There’s a few points of discussion I plan on hitting in this article about John Carter, such as:

• John Carter‘s origins in literature
• How much I enjoyed the film
• The Disney regime change that spelled the end of this movie’s future
• Film media’s readiness to decimate the film
• Maybe a few other minor points

Origins of John Carter

Published in the February 1912 edition of The All-Story with the name Under the Moons of Mars, “Normal Bean” a.k.a. Edgar Rice Burroughs left a mark on humanity that has influenced science-fiction and science-fact to this day. A few years later the story was published under the name “A Princess of Mars” and was the first of many stories focused on the character of John Carter. The Barsoom series all-in-all consists of 12 novels and novellas about John and other characters met along the way. Inspiring such authors as Arthur C. Clarke and Ray Bradbury along with director James Cameron (for Avatar) and Flash Gordon (which in turn inspired Star Wars creator George Lucas), Burroughs and Carter have ancestral ties to many of the sci-fi franchises today. Even Carl Sagan and possibly the U.S. Space Program itself have ties to John Carter. People laughed at the tv-spot saying “Before Avatar and Star Wars, there was John Carter“, but it’s entirely true. You could possibly say Burroughs himself had a glimpse of the future before the rest of us, but maybe the future owes its current standings to John Carter. Anyway, after that brief history lesson, I can speak about the film itself.

My Feelings on the Film

A quick synopsis:

In the year 1868, former Confederate Army Captain John Carter finds himself disillusioned and regretful after the loss of the Civil War. As he heads to the west to strike it rich in gold, he finds himself in a mysterious cave with mystical powers that “telegraph” him to Barsoom, or, as we earthlings know it, Mars. There he is thrust into a civil war that is not his own. Does he care to fight in it? Will he be used as a tool when the Martian races see his awe-inspiring strength (fostered by a weaker gravity than Earth)?

Quite simply put, from the reviews that came out, it seemed to me that if you really wanted to love John Carter then you’d love it. Simultaneously, if you wanted to hate it (and you wanted to sink your teeth into the failure story that Disney is spinning — more on that later) then you’d absolutely hate it. Don’t get me wrong, the film has some problems, and I can talk about those first. Taylor Kitsch does a serviceable job as leading man John Carter. Some of his delivery fell a little flat for me, and the relationship with Lynn Collins’ Dejah Thoris (pictured right) felt a bit rushed, but overall I enjoyed both performances, and Kitsch plays a better Civil War vet than I thought. The pacing is a bit quick during on Barsoom and somewhat slow during character development on Barsoom, a large vocabulary is thrown around and is tough to follow if you’re not completely into it, but I didn’t find those to be a problem.

I fell in love with this movie, and yeah, I definitely wanted to before I even saw it, but I don’t think it’s that hard to do even without prior feelings. The film provides a captivating story that treads on some familiar territory, but in all likelihood it’s familiar because wherever you saw it before borrowed it from the books! I’m generally not one to get emotional during movies, but a bit more than an hour into the film, there’s a moment that resonated with me in a way that I never saw coming, crosscutting between flashbacks and current crises. Even before that, the movie itself is just a fun ride, and I think if you buy the premise and strap yourself in, you’ll have a good time with it if you want to. Another thing, the film could quite easily feel artificial. There’s a lot of computer generated imagery, between the martian aliens and their technology, but the film still is grounded in the fantastic location shooting. Shot on location in Utah and New Mexico, when John suddenly finds himself on Mars, it has quite the alien look and feel to it. I think the location shooting certainly benefitted the movie in a large way. Just so you know, I ended up seeing this movie another two times in the week between beginning to write this article and finishing it. Anyway, I’ll point to some highlights:

• Woola (pictured below) is the man. The 10-legged dog-like creature that can run 250 miles per hour certainly steals the show many times throughout the movie.
• The special effects are fantastic, whether it’s the green, six-limbed tharks or the elegant, light-riding airships, the world looks gorgeous, specifically over top of the location shooting.
• The bookends to this movie are complete genius. Some people may find them a little confusing, but if you pay close attention it’ll fall into place.
• The concepts in the story seem downright outlandish for something written in the early 1900’s which is absolutely fascinating.

The Political Murder of John Carter

You get the point, I love this movie. However I’m writing this article to not only cover how I felt about the movie, but also how the world, in particular, Disney, felt about the movie. I’ll start with this, a statement by Disney released on March 19th, 2012 to deadline.com:

In light of the theatrical performance of John Carter ($184 million global box office), we expect the film to generate an operating loss of approximately $200 million during our second fiscal quarter ending March 31. As a result, our current expectation is that the Studio segment will have an operating loss of between $80 and $120 million for the second quarter. As we look forward to the second half of the year, we are excited about the upcoming releases of The Avengers and Brave, which we believe have tremendous potential to drive value for the Studio and the rest of the company.

That came out a mere 10 days after John Carter hit theaters. I’ll make a note that as of April 4th, the movie has made $66 million domestically for $254 million worldwide. Now at first glance it’s quite strange that anyone would be trumpeting the failure of a movie. Anyone who has seen the trailers to this movie can tell you that they’re not particularly good. Trailer 2 at the link I’ve supplied does absolutely nothing to tell you the premise of the film. Yes, there’s a fight, Earth could be next?! Where is this fight? I don’t think the word “Mars” is uttered once throughout the trailer, which some would say is due to the fact that Mission to Mars and Ghosts of Mars or even Mars Needs Moms are terrible flops. Mars has become somewhat of a taboo in Hollywood, in fact, the original Total Recall is the last movie with any semblance of Mars in it that has done well, and even the remake due out in August is said to have shed its Mars-based content. Also, Michael Giacchino’s score is largely passed up for some anachronistic and otherwise out of place crap-rock, giving the trailer a cheap feeling to me. But back to the main point — why are these trailers so misrepresentative or non-representative of the film at hand? Murmurs around the web suggest that there was a regime change at Disney during the production of John Carter. The people who greenlit and funded John Carter were not the ones to market it and subsequently decry it as a failure. The new regime may have seen the film as an open wound, bleeding cash out into the ether, or maybe they just simply wanted to embarrass the old regime. In any event, it’s a sick fate for a movie that doesn’t deserve it, and yes, this is mostly speculation off of what I’ve seen on the internet, but take a look yourself.

In any event, John Carter was terribly marketed and its “failure” was trumpeted out of the doors of Disney. March 31st marked the end of the second quarter of the fiscal year, so I’m sure the 10-day-out announcement of a $200 million operating loss was some sort of play to get shareholders or stock-watchers in line. Maybe Disney was tempering their stock to have The Avengers or Brave pull it up in Q3 to great effect. All in all, it’s sad that John Carter is the victim of all of these political power plays, but it’s Hollywood, that’s how the movie business works.

Film Media’s Lack of Love

Let’s take a look at the consensus behind the film’s 51% certified rotten status on RottenTomatoes.com:

While John Carter looks terrific and delivers its share of pulpy thrills, it also suffers from uneven pacing and occasionally incomprehensible plotting and characterization.

Okay, fine, I touched on the majority of that throughout this article. Does it really deserve a 51% from critics? It’s got a 69% from users, which is nice to note. Obviously film criticism is largely subjective, it’s all about opinions. You can argue about the inherent worth of any film as much as you want but quite simply put, not everyone sees the same thing when it comes to film or even “art” in general. So let’s see what critics have gotten out of the film themselves:

Ed Whitfield of The Ooh Tray says:

Fails to transcend the generic.

Alright. Meanwhile Donald Clark of the Irish Times acknowledges what Whitfield failed to do:

The finished entity feels like a rip-off of a film that ripped-off several rip-offs of Carter’s own ancient source material.

Yeah, something this important to the sci-fi genre certainly treads the danger of seeming like it’s a rip-off. I’m not entirely sure that it’s possible to transcend the genre that the source material helped to found, but more importantly I think these reviewers saw the movie without the framework that I put up for myself. I love science fiction, it’s the genre that I find myself wanting to spend the most time in. When I learned that Edgar Rice Burroughs’  Barsoom Series was so instrumental in many of the things that I love, I suppose I could cling to the reasons that the movie are great, and wonder just how exactly this is the product of a man born in the 1800’s. I wanted to fall in love with the characters, and the setting really felt like Mars to me. While the subject matter is dense with new terms and many characters to meet, you can tell that they probably were given more time to develop in the book, and the saddest thing to me is that this is a great stepping off point for a franchise but yet that second movie which would feature deeper character development and more behind-the-scenes sci-fi is never going to happen. But this is still just my subjective take on what I saw.

I think most of the media wanted a failure. The marketing framed the movie in a poor light, early box office projections looked bad, and despite some good buzz coming off of the embargo lift, a lot of critics didn’t want to love John Carter. I don’t think the movie was given a fair chance. Disney’s terrible marketing campaign made it impossible for some to shake their ill-colored preconceptions of the film, and it hurt the film overall. Clearly as stated earlier, Disney doesn’t care. It’ll make The Avengers and Brave look better and maybe they don’t have to pay out any box office bonuses which I’m sure they’re not crying about.

At the very least, I hope this pushes those who read it to seek out the movie however they can. It’ll be out of most theaters this Friday I’m sure, but it’ll be out on Blu-Ray and DVD sometime this Summer. It’s currently #24 overall in Movies & TV on Amazon, and #1, 2, and 3 respectively in Blu-Ray Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Action. So hopefully it’ll live a longer life on home media and get the respect that it deserves. Disney will probably make a majority of their money back with home media sales but I don’t think it’s worth it to hold your breath over a sequel even if the movie does well on Blu-Ray. It’s not likely that the movie will earn the $450 million more it needs for a sequel, according to Andrew Stanton in a New Yorker article and headlined by Vulture.

A few things for your post-viewing experience:

• A fan-made facebook group demanding a sequel: “Take me back to Barsoom! I want John Carter to have a sequel!“
• The sound & music of John Carter on vimeo.
• /Film’s 11-and-a-half minute interview with director Andrew Stanton on youtube.
• /Film’s 8-and-a-half minute interview with John Carter himself, Taylor Kitsch on youtube.
• Harry Knowles (of Ain’t It Cool News) interviews director Andrew Stanton on the film and his outline for the sequels here.
• Finally, Andrew Stanton’s TED Talk, “The Clues to a Great Story“.

Lastly, the beautiful Mondo poster by J.C. Richard, handed out at midnight IMAX screenings: