So my brother and I took Mum to see John Carter (of Mars) for Mothers' Day today. In spite of a fairly lukewarm reception from critics we enjoyed the film immensely.
John Carter (of Mars) is a big, silly space adventure film about a former Confederate cavalryman who is mysteriously transported to Mars, called Barsoom by its indigenous population, where he quickly rescues a princess from attack by her would-be husband and ruler and, inevitably, is sucked into a war to liberate the planet.
There are a variety of subplots and some attempts at intrigue, but that is really all the plot amounts to.
John Carter is a throwback in every sense. Based on a novel that celebrated its 100th anniversary this year, John Carter is a film where the men are strong and silent, the women beautiful and smart, villains are evil and violence can be non-reflective.
What saves this film from itself is the fact that it is aware of what it is and revels in its shear ridiculousness. It was allowed to be what it was when it was conceived - a piece of diverting entertainment.
When compared to Avatar, with which it shares more than a few similarities, it throws Avatar's failures into clear light. The characters in both are largely two-dimensional portrayals of stock characters, we have a hero on a new world, with a new body that has given him a new lease of life. He is taken in and taught be strange-looking aliens, falls in love with one of the locals and (SPOILERS) decides to remain on the new world rather than return to his old. Both become the leaders of the alien-looking aliens and lead them to victory in a kind of revolution.
Where John Carter succeeds and Avatar fails, is that we are not asked to care about the characters. All of Avatar seemed to be desperately screaming, "Care about me!" It tries to make a heavy handed point about invading a new place for resources, an environmental theme, a comment on faith and so on.
While John Carter also does these things, they are very much incidental to the events and are throwaway comments. It's not like we're held down while the movie's good intentions repeatedly kick us in the crotch.
I guess what I'm saying is John Carter was utterly unpretentious, or at least if it wasn't I missed the pretension. It's silly and it knows it's silly, and makes no apology for that. There is even a cute-ugly Martian dog that follows Carter around. Carter himself spends most of the film being called "Virginia" by the green-skinned Martians despite his efforts to correct them.
In an era when even big, goofy summer blockbusters feel obliged and entitled to try to make some sort of comment (often none too subtly) on world affairs, it was actually refreshing to have a series of colourful images flashed before me with a simple plot to account for who is where and why.
And the images were spectacular. The film opens with a vast, walking city. Earth and Mars (or Jarsoom and Barsoom) are rendered in the glorious wide-angle cinematography of a Western, and there are beautiful avian flying machines on Mars. The action was fast and engaging but, presumably as a result of being edited for 3D, does away with the irritating recent trend for shaky, hand-held camerawork and rapid cutting. As a result I could tell what was going on and who was winning.
The aliens themselves (and by aliens I mean the green-skinned Thark inhabitants of Mars, as opposed to the human-looking red-skinned aliens of Mars) may be the film's greatest achievement. They were wonderfully animated and rendered and the Willem Dafoe-voiced leader of one tribe and his daughter may have been the most sympathetic and interesting characters in the film.
John Carter also benefited from a strong cast of secondary characters, with greats like Ciarán Hinds, James Purefoy (who when joined by Polly Walker as the voice of an alien and Nicholas Woodeson as an Earth attorney prompted to my brother to question if this was HBO's Rome In Space), Dominic West and Mark Strong. Taylor Kitsch himself was not so strong, but to be fair he had very little character to work with. More strong actors such as Art Malik and the criminally underrated Bryan Cranston have brief walk-on roles.
Oddly enough the highest praise I can give John Carter is that it was set when the book was set. Given the film has been in preproduction for the best part of a century (had one of these attempts borne fruit, it would have predated Snow White as the first animated feature film) it must have been tempting to update the story to make it "relevant". I am so glad the producers resisted the urge to make the story about a US Marine spirited away to Mars while hiding from Taliban fighters in the caves of Afghanistan, for example, as this would have wrecked the fundamental naivety of the story, which stops it feeling overtly simplistic. Carter is a good old-fashioned action-adventure hero. He is not burdened by the questions about whether he has the right to do what he does, or whether it is moral. He is not going to have a crisis of confidence. He is a hero of a simpler time when heroes were dashing, frontiers were exciting, violence was a logical and acceptable solution to problems, and the fallen were celebrated not mourned. To write a modern character like this would be shocking and distasteful, but is entertaining in a Saturday morning serial sort of way.
Short-comings of the film would be it feels about 20 minutes longer than it needed to be, in part because of a lot of to-ing and fro-ing on Mars, which works in a novel but can feel a little tedious on screen. Carter himself was simultaneously over and under developed. He is given artificial depth by hints of a family tragedy in his frontier past, but this is quickly forgotten when the hot Martian princess crosses his path, but these are minor complaints and certainly nothing distractingly awful.
The 3D was fine, and helped with some shots, but I cannot imagine enjoying it significantly less in 2D
So there you have it. John Carter is certainly not going to win any awards for depth or subtlety, and I would hate every movie to be like this, but once in a while it is pleasant to go to the cinema and not have to grapple with moral issues and questions.
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