Maybe after my huge disappointment with CLASH OF THE TITANS and IMMORTALS last year, my expectations for the latest fantasy blockbuster JOHN CARTER were low.
But I liked it. I really did.
My partner and I saw it in the theatre yesterday, the way – I guess – these movies are meant to be seen nowadays: on a massive IMAX screen with 3D glasses.
JOHN CARTER is a good story. The title character is a young, embittered former Confederate General from the Civil War. After losing his wife and daughter to a fire, Carter is grasping for a reason to live. He finds that reason when he’s stumbles on a magical artifact that transports him to an amazing world on Mars, where some trick of gravity, or bone density? (it’s not explained very clearly), gives him super strength, including the ability to leap great distances. There, he realizes that his abilities are exactly what the strange inhabitants need to save their planet from a tyrant who seeks to conquer all, and in the process destroy Mars.
Taylor Kitsch does a decent job as the movie’s hero. There’s not a lot of emotional range with these type of characters, but my favorite scenes from the movie were where he was overcoming his early dilemmas – a funny sequence of breakaways from the Union mounty who wants to recruit him, his awkward first steps on Mars with super-powered legs, and his attempts to ditch a martian creature, something like a giant, reptilian bulldog, who attaches to Carter hard and fast.
The action scenes are harrowing and great, and the world on Mars Barsoom is well-realized and imaginative.
My complaints are that the movie goes on too long, and I was uninspired by the romantic storyline. Of the former, there’s a point quite early on, when I think the audience gets it that this story is all going to come down to John Carter rallying Barsoom to liberation. But the journey is a belabored by a trip back to Carter’s original captors, the alien Tharks. We know what’s going to happen – Carter is going to succeed, no matter what incredible challenge the Tharks put him up to. They could’ve cut 15-20 minutes of film.
