John Carter (2012)

Hello everyone. Recently I decided to get back into acting and I’m going to be appearing in a production of Comedy of Errors in two weeks time as Dromio of Ephesus aka the best Dromio.

Dromio of Syracuse is trash and you all know it.

Also, Spouse of Mouse is on a business trip leaving me with two orphans crying plaintively for their mother night and day.

Also, I have a really tight writing deadline to meet this week.

Ergo, review short. Soz.

***

Normally, a film like John Carter is exactly the kind of movie that I dread to review.

It aroused no strong feelings in me. I didn’t love it and I didn’t hate it. But honestly, the more I watched it the more I realised…this is kinda good? I mean, the elements are really strong. For being a decade old, the effects hold up a lot better than most of what Disney is putting out today.

The cast is full of actors I love or at least have no ill will towards (I like Taylor Kitsch, y’all are just mean). The script is nothing spectacular but perfectly solid. There was clearly a lot of thought and love and creativity and subtle world-building that went into the design of its fictional Martian setting. And there’s some strikingly beautiful cinematography. Like this scene where John Carter is fleeing on horseback across the Arizona Territory pursued by Union Soldiers:

Just gorgeous, old fashioned film-making. There is a lot to like in John Carter.

And yet, and yet…something isn’t working here. Some wheel just ain’t clicking.

Okay, history time.

Edgar Rice Burroughs, author of Tarzan, wrote the Barsoom series in the nineteen tens. These books predominantly feature the adventures of John Carter, an American Civil War veteran from Earth who is transported to Barsoom (Mars) and becomes a Conan the Barbarian figure, fighting wars, defeating monsters and having proper sex with girls.

“Refresh my memory, Mr Carter, which side of the Civil War did you fight on?”“Oh well, you know. The chaos of war. Who can even remember?”

Yeah, we’ll get to that.

Anyway, the Barsoom books are in this weird place in terms of broader pop culture. On the one hand, not only is John Carter not that well known, he’s not even the most famous creation of his author (that of course being Jimber-Jaw the caveman. And Tarzan, I guess).

But on the other hand, these books are, no joke, some of the most influential science fiction ever written. I mean, you have to work damn hard to find a piece of American sci-fi that isn’t at least indirectly influenced by Carter. For starters, Superman has a whole load of Carter’s DNA and that’s pretty much the entire superhero genre in his debt right there. Likewise, Star Wars, Dune, Warhammer 40k, Avatar…I could go on and on but I think you get the point.

The problem is…okay, personal aside. I, somehow, managed to make it to my twenties without ever listening to the Beatles. I know, I don’t understand how that happened either. And the thing is, when I finally sat down to listen to them my first reaction was “that’s it?! That’s the greatest band ever?!”

It’s the old “Seinfeld is Unfunny” trope. Pop culture has been rifling through Old Man Carter’s pockets for so long that there’s virtually nothing left that hasn’t been done elsewhere and probably better. Which is doubly unfair when you consider that Hollywood has been trying to make a John Carter movie since the thirties. If only one of those projects had gotten off the ground, the whole history of science fiction cinema could have been radically different. Instead we got this, a movie who’s only claim to fame is how few people saw it and how little of an impact it left.

Anyway, the film begins in 1881 with Edgar Rice Burroughs (yes, that one) attending the funeral of his uncle, John Carter. Carter’s body is laid to rest in a tomb and Carter’s attorney gives Burroughs his uncle’s journal which should take him approximately 130 minutes to read (less if edited for terrestrial).

So, flashback to 1868 in the Arizona territory. John Carter is a prospector who gets press-ganged into the Union Army by one Colonel Powell to fight the Apaches. Okay, so, let’s talk about the elephant in the room. In the novels, John Carter is a former Confederate soldier. Knowing this going in, I was expecting that the movie would either switch Carter’s allegiance to the Union or simply gloss over it all together and not mention it. To my surprise, the movie does neither. Now, the only thing I can imagine that would be more uncomfortable than an unrepentant proud, Confederate Carter would be a weepy, so-damn-sorry Carter. I want to watch a movie about a woke Confederate about as much as I want to watch a movie about a racist one. Actually, probably less, at least the latter would only insult my ethics, not my intelligence. But how the movie deals with this problem is actually, I think, really smart. We get a genuinely fun scene where Powell tries to recruit Carter only for Carter to keep trying to escape mid-sentence which ends with Powell giving his pitch with Carter locked in a cell:

POWELL: And in the eyes of Uncle Sam, a necessary man for the defence of the Arizona Territory.

CARTER: No.

POWELL: Son, we are up to our chin-straps in Apaches.

CARTER: Not my concern.

POWELL: I do believe it is your concern, Captain. Folks are being attacked in their own homes, slain.

CARTER: You started it, you finish it.

POWELL: Ohh! You gone native, have you?

CARTER: Apaches can go to hell too. We’re nothing but a warring species. And I want no part of it.

Carter has indeed severed his allegiance to the Confederacy, but only as a side-effect of severing his allegiance to the entire human race. He is just done with everybody‘s shit. The entire species can jump off a cliff as far as he’s concerned. I like this for two reasons; it feels more realistic and it’s also a good starting point for a story about a man who finds new purpose on an alien world.

Anyway, Carter escapes by pissing through the bars of his cell which attracts the guard who gets knocked out and his keys stolen. Carter rides off on Powell’s horse. Powell and a gang of soldiers tear off after him until they come face to face with a band of Apaches. It goes exactly how you’d expect and in the ensuing shoot-out Powell is wounded and Carter turns back to rescue him…which flies completely in the face of everything we’ve been shown about this character up until this point. I don’t even know why it’s in the script other than Powell is a character in the original story and apparently that’s justification enough for him to tag along.

Anyway, fleeing the Apaches, Carter and Powell find themselves in a mysterious cave full of gold. In the cave, a mysterious bald man appears and tries to stab Carter. Carter, having brought a gun to a knife fight, shoots the dude. He then touches the guy’s medallion which instantly teleports him to the surface of Mars.

Man. The Curiosity Rover was lying through its teeth!

After a neat scene of John getting use to the lower Martian gravity, he discovers that he can jump around like Mario. He gets captured by Tars Tarkas (Willem Defoe), a four armed green alien who is king of a species called the Tharks. And there’s a running running gag where, because Carter introduced himself by mentioning his home state, the Tharks insist on calling him “Virginia”. It’s cute.

“My friends call me “Ginny”.

Alright so. Here’s the setup. As well as the Tharks, there is a species of human-like Red Martians. There are two Red Martian cities, Zodanga and Helium. Zodanga is cruel and Helium is noble (in which case, it really should have been called “Argon” or “Xenon”.)

“Helium’s a noble gas too.”“What?! Since when?!”“Since the birth of the universe, sweetie.”

The things you learn living this blogging life o’ mine.

Okay, so. Helium and Zodanga are at war and the Tharks want nothing to do with it. The ruler of Helium, Tardos Mors (Ciarán Hinds) desperately agrees to wed his daughter, the Princess Dejah Thoris (Lynn Collins) to the ruler of Zodanga, Sab Than (Dominic West). She ain’t having that and tries to escape and is rescued by Carter when her ship is shot down by Sab Than’s forces over the Thark’s lands.

The Tharks are so impressed by Virginia’s fighting prowess that Tars Tarkas proclaims Carter to be “Dotar Sojat”.

Carter tries to refuse but Tars Tarkas is all “nice princess you got there, shame if something happened to her” so he has to accept. Carter is obviously anxious to get chatting to the only woman round here who doesn’t lay eggs and when he starts talking about oceans she assumes he’s mad. We then get a scene where Dejah draws a map of the solar system in the sand and Carter realises that he’s not on Earth, but on Mars. Oh, and then he stands and looks up at the two moons in the sky.

See, Johnny, I kinda feel you should have been able to figure that out without help.

When Carter tells Dejah how he came to Mars via a medallion, she tells him that he must be a “Thern”, a mysterious race of messengers for the goddess Issus. She takes him to the Tharks temple and, by reading some ancient inscriptions, Dejah discovers a map to the Gates of Iss which supposedly is how the Therns travel to and from the planet. She offers to guide him there in exchange for Carter helping her escape from the Tharks. Now a female Thark named Sola, who has befriended Carter tries to warn them against entering the Thark’s temple but all three of them get arrested and sentenced to death. But, it turns out that Tars Tarkas is actually Sola’s father (Tharks think families are cringe and don’t normally acknowledge familial bonds) so he frees all three of them in the night and they escape with the medallion.

On the way, there’s some shenanigans where it turns out Dejah was actually leading them to Helium, hoping that when he arrived there Carter would be so bowled over by the rightness of her people’s cause that we would join the fight against Zodanga. Carter snarls that “everyone thinks their cause is just!”

“Even when it really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really isn’t!”

Finally she breaks down and admits that she just doesn’t want to marry the Prince of Zodanga because she thinks he’s a douche and he’s all “okay, that I can respect”. She agrees to take him to the Gates of Iss for real this time and in return he promises to consider joining the fight against Zodanga. She does this even though she admits that the Thern’s aren’t real and she doesn’t really believe that he’s from Earth, just that he’s a very bouncy lunatic.

Now, turns out that Therns are real and they are secretly guiding Zodanga and one of them is Matai Shang, who is played by Mark Strong because this movie was made in 2012, right smack bang in the middle of that period where he was in absolutely everything.

Shang has brough an army of Warhoons, who are like Tharks but even nastier, to recapture Dejah so that she can be married to Sab Than which is all part of the Therns Master Plan. As the horde attacks, Carter tells Dejah and Sola to flee and he takes on this entire army single-handed while having flashbacks to burying his dead wife and child after their farmstead was torched during the war.

And it. Is. EPIC.

I mean. Fucking hell. No notes.

Sab Than then shows up in his airship along with Dejah’s father, who explains that Sab came to him to tell him that she’d been taken prisoner by the Tharks. Zodanga and Helium have made peace and she is told she must marry him to secure the alliance. Dejah thinks Sab Than is a fucking SNAKE because look at him:

Sab Than, you are a gaping asshole. We both know this.

But, Carter desperately needs medical care so she agrees.

Carter wakes up in Zodanga and gets taken on a tour of the city by Shang who reveals his eeeevil scheme to have Dejah assassinated once she’s married Sab Than and unified Barsoon. He explains that the Therns feed off the death of worlds and that they are guiding the history of Mars to an eventual apocalypse.

Carter escapes and meets back up with Sola and the two of them return to…okay, apparently it’s called “Tharkville” but that sounds like something dreamed up by Doctor Seuss.

All the Tharks down in Tharkville loved Christmas a lot. But the Thern who lived just north of Tharkville did not.

Tar Tarkas has been overthrown after letting Carter, Dejah and Sola escape, however, so Tars and Carter are both thrown into an arena and have to fight two massive white apes. Carter beats them, takes over the tribe and leads a massive army of Tharks against Zodanga’s forces. Sab Than’s killed, the wedding’s prevented and Carter and Dejah Thoris get married.

Happy ending?

Not quite. Shang ambushes Carter, and teleports him back to Earth. Carter spends the next ten years on Earth fighting the Therns who have infiltrated Earth society just like they did Barsoom’s.

Now, here’s where it gets really complicated. It turns out that how the teleporter works is it creates a copy of you on Mars while your body remains unconscious on Earth, seemingly dead but in a state of stasis. Carter finds another teleporter on Earth but warns his nephew in the journal that using it will mean that his body is vulnerable to attack from the Therns on Earth.

Back in the present, Edgar Rice Burroughs rushes to his uncle’s tomb to prevent the Therns from destroying Carter’s body…only for Carter to show up, very much alive, and gun them down.

Carter explains to his baffled nephew that he was only pretending to be dead and that NOW he intends to return to Barsoom for real, now what he knows Eddie boy is willing to guard his body until the day he dies so that Carter can continue having hot sex with his beautiful Martian princess wife.

Cheer up. It’ll give you plenty of time to write your novels.

***

Many have blamed the historical failure of John Carter on an apparently abysmal marketing campaign. I can’t really speak to that as the only ad I ever saw for it was the teaser that made use of Peter Gabriel’s My Body is Cage.

And, clearly, anything that makes use of Peter Gabriel’s My Body is Cage is one of the greatest ads ever made.

Renaming it from “Princess of Mars” or “John Carter of Mars” to plain old “John Carter”?

Yeah, okay, that probably hurt it some. But I think I’ve figured out why, even though I do like quite a lot of John Carter, I can’t really seem to convert my love of the parts to a love of the whole.

Mostly, the plot is just too generic to engage. Yes, obviously the princess is going to recruit Carter to her cause. Of course Carter and the princess are going to end up together. No doy, Carter is going to rally the Tharks and lead them into battle against Zodanga. These tropes were, if not new, at least less used in Burrough’s time but because the Barsoom books have been such a foundation for so much modern sci-fi and fantasy it feels really, really familiar.

Now, that’s not necessarily a death sentence for the film. Not every movie has to be The Prestige. In fact, there are real advantages to a familiar, well-worn plot structure. Take for example, The First Avenger.

Was there a single moment in that film where you thought “damn, I did not see that coming?”

Of course not. The plot is pure boilerplate.

What makes it work is all the stuff that hangs on the completely rote plot. The music, the performances, the characters, the period detail etc etc which are all top notch and elevate the movie.

And to be clear, none of the equivalent elements in John Carter are bad. They’re just…not…quite…good…enough.

That said, I really hope there are people out there who have fallen in love with this film and are willing to champion it.

I just can’t quite bring myself to be one of them.

NEXT UPDATE: 18th May 2023

NEXT TIME: The bird, the bat and the cat…