“When I saw you, I believed it was a sign”
At the end of 2008 I went to the theatre to see what would be my second over digital 3D experience. That was watching James Cameron’s Avatar, a film that I’m pretty sure we all wish we could stop talking about. The film was lauded for all its technical achievements and continuously hated for its lack of original storytelling. I compare John Carter to Avatar in its plot structure so closely that I almost forgot while seeing this movie that it was a new release. It does very little for the majority of the runtime to stand out from the pack. However, coming to the end of the film, with a twist, the film seperates itself finally and I’m glad it did.
John Carter has all the things we love of a great science-fiction/adventure movie. It gives us a new world for us to explore that’s vast and full of characters for us to enjoy, it has pretty well defined good and bad, accepted and outcasts, animated and live-action, and we also get the wonderment of exploring this world with a character who’s convinced that he isn’t there for a reason. Like all of these films it’s thrust forward not so much by our protagonist’s, John Carter (Taylor Kitsch), will but rather his morals, which isn’t exactly new to us. With him lost in this new world his only goal is to get back to his cave of gold on Earth and leave the red planet behind him. As he journeys more and more he ends up in the middle of a war that he seems to be the only one that can turn the tide.
The reason why Avatar was so great at first was that while it had issues it was fun adventure. This is what John Carter is and more. You’re not going to be wowed by its design or imagery anymore than you were wowed by Star Wars when it was first released in the 70s. The effect of that initial amazement wears off after years of seeing it retreaded year and after year by Hollywood suits saying “that’s all they want anyways”. Sadly their partly right, because if this kind of a story was lost forever I would be sad.
Andrew Stanton (WALL-E and Finding Nemo) shows that while he found it difficult to break the mold here he definitely knows how to make trite storytelling work for his advantage with the addition of a few characters worth keeping note of, including John Carter, Tars Tarkas (Willem Dafoe), Dejah Thoris (Lynn Collins) and the lovable dog thingy that keeps following Carter around. With this band of misfits we get to enjoy what will be a forgettable tale of a man lost in all manners of the word.