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MEN'S BASKETBALL
THURSDAY, MARCH 29, 2012
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
By the numbers
MATT GALLOWAY
mgalloway@kansan.com
2
13
December 10,2011
ENTERTAINMENT
...
Movie Review John Carter
// LANDON MCDONALD
Since their publication nearly a century ago, Edgar Rice Burroughs's John Carter novels have represented a literary benchmark for geeks, a sci-fi touchstone that has gone on to influence everything from "Star Wars" and "Avatar" to Stephen King's "The Dark Tower" saga.
Now Andrew Stanton, the Pixar-schooled futurist behind "Wall-E" and "Finding Nemo," is attempting to kickstart a new franchise with "John Carter,"
an ambitious but dramatically inert swashbuckler that suffers from uneven plotting, lackluster visuals and a mythology rendered obsolete by decades of refined imitation. To be fair though, almost any movie involving a Civil War soldier who gets zapped to Mars to battle giant white apes and save a princess who's also a professor is bound to seem inherently goofy when presented on an enormous screen in murky, post-converted 3-D.
After a ponderous prologue featuring a fictionalized Burroughs (Daryl Sabara from "Spy Kids") and the discovery of a cave lined with Apache gold, John Carter (Taylor Kitsch) awakens on Mars, referred to here as Barsoom. Rendered superhumanly light and agile by the red planet's gravity field, the former Confederate quickly finds himself caught up in a sectarian war between two city-states: the embattled citizens of Helium, represented by the spunky scientist Princess Dejah (Lynn Collins), and Zodanga, led by an evil autocrat (Dominic West) and his ominously bald advisor (Mark Strong). There's also a proud warrior race of four-armed green creatures led by the bombastic Tars Tarkas (Willem Dafoe), who insists on calling our hero Virginia after a conversation about home states is lost in translation.
Despite the film's notoriously troubled pre-production, one would expect Stanton's vaunted direction to combine these disparate elements into a rollicking adventure full of breathless spectacle and a genuine sense of wonder and affection for the characters. Yet "John Carter" stumbles where all his previous efforts have soared. Much fault can be found with the screenplay, which seeks to replicate Burroughs's pulpy prose with embarrassingly stilted dialogue.
It doesn't help matters that Kitsch chooses to play Carter as a sneering, guttural meathead instead of a noble savior of worlds. The attractive Collins fares a bit better as Dejah, although Carrie Fisher's Leia remains the bun-headed standard by which all warrior princesses are judged and then summarily dismissed. Strong and Dafoe, both consumate actors, rail against the constraints of the script and in Dafoe's case, the woefully uninspired creature design that turns a passionate, rousing performance into a gawky, scultling blob. Is it too late to call Pixar?
FINAL RATING: ★★★
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