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Mar 10, 201280The achievement of John Carter is that it takes the elements worn to nubs by everything from "Star Wars" to "Avatar" to TV's "Fringe" and makes them fresh again.
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78Old-school "Gosh, wow!" sense-of-wonder filmmaking is in short supply in these anxious days, and John Carter (of Mars!) left me with my disbelief in suspended animation and once or twice with goosebumps dotting my arms. And that's enough for me.
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75Did anybody expect it to be a metaphor for modern America?
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75The result is an entertaining diversion but it lacks the magnificence one desires in the opening chapter of a would-be franchise.
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75John Carter is too wickedly strange not to recommend. Movies this expensive usually play it much safer.
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75Against the odds, John Carter is itself pretty amazing - an epic pulp saga that slowly rises to the level of its best imitations and wins you over by degrees.
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75Spirit counts for something too, and John Carter has plenty of that, in addition to the requisite dashes of wit.
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75John Carter manages to be a ridiculous amount of fun, even if you are immune to the charms of Taylor Kitsch (Friday Night Lights) running around in what amounts to a stylish loincloth.
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75Rather than trying to overwhelm viewers by overloading the senses, John Carter's effects strive to create something new using as their foundation a book that's fired imaginations for the past century.
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70This middle section, in which both Carter and the audience get a crash course in the politics, history, and theology of the Red Planet, is the movie at its most imaginative and most fun.
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70If you're willing to suspend not just disbelief but also all considerations of logic and intelligence and narrative coherence, it's also a rip-roaring, fun adventure, fatefully balanced between high camp and boyish seriousness at almost every second.
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70Director Andrew Stanton's Disney extravaganza is a rather charming pastiche.
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63That's kind of the aesthetic that Stanton is going for: over-the-top pulp. But there's something generic about the digitally rendered Martians, and there's a corniness to the dialogue that keeps the audience from any kind of emotional attachment to the Tharks and Zodangans and their ilk.
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63John Carter bites off more than even Woola can chew, but it's built on something rare: wonder instead of Hollywood cynicism.
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63Does John Carter get the job done for the weekend action audience? Yes, I suppose it does. The massive city on legs that stomps across the landscape is well-done. The Tharks are ingenious, although I'm not sure why they need tusks. Lynn Collins makes a terrific heroine.
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60Get your ass to Mars? A handsome new sci-fi adventure that feels rather familiar. Enjoyable enough while it lasts, John Carter is big on ambition and disappointingly short on action.
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60There's no wonder or elation or even dopy sincerity here - just a high level of proficiency and, yes, a lot of expensive CGI.
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60There are plenty of entertaining moments to latch onto beneath the sci-fi tropes -- and maybe even a few that will inspire a new generation of storytellers.
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60It is a potpourri of arcane and familiar genres. "Mash-up" doesn't begin to capture this hectic hybrid; it's more like a paintball fight. Messy and chaotic, in other words, but also colorful and kind of fun.
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60What director Andrew Stanton has brought forth from Burroughs' limited, hoary source material is actually kind of fun.
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60Stanton has built a fantastic world, but the action is unmemorable. Still, just about every sci-fi/fantasy/superhero adventure you ever loved is in here somewhere.
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58So why is everything so thuddingly fun-free?
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55When Stanton lets the film be pure popcorn entertainment, with swashbuckling set pieces and lovably corny romanticism, it's a great ride in the Indiana Jones tradition.
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50Epically fantastic would be a welcome change, although epically awful would at least keep the symmetry. Alas, epically bland will have to do.
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50Though the project, based on the Edgar Rice Burroughs novel "A Princess of Mars," is ambitious, it's also bloated, dreary and humorless.
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50The result is that John Carter plays like an alternate, inferior version of "Avatar"…Plus fleeting hints of John Ford's "The Searchers" - for this is also a Western.
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Mar 8, 201250Unlike Stanton's memorable animation features, this is surprisingly devoid of humor or winning characterization, though the special effects are fantastic.
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50John Carter isn't much - or rather, it's too much and not enough in weird, clumpy combinations - but it is a curious sort of blur.
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50It's all too much, and it's too hard to follow. Less is more, and this movie proves it.
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50The film's biggest (and saddest) crime is malaise - it's not that John Carter doesn't care about what it's doing, it just can't make us care, even though the magnitude of every event, conflict and emotion is as melodramatic as its Victorian roots.
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40Burroughs invented a primal fiction: a man winds up on another planet, and has to find his way among strange creatures. Sticking to that fable, which was central to "Avatar," might have saved John Carter, but Stanton loses its appealing simplicity in too many battles, too many creatures, too many redundant episodes. [26 March 2012, p.108]
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40This new Disney film, marked by myriad lapses and marketing follies, bears the woefully familiar earmarks of a big studio production that was pulled and hauled every which way until it lost all shape and flavor.
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40That John Carter is so hit and miss, and miss, and miss is unfortunate on any number of levels.
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40Aside from a few inspired vistas and alien life-forms (the Road Runner–fast red planet dog Woola is sure to sell a bazillion action figures), John Carter is as deadly dull as its basso-voiced, beefcake slab of a star, Taylor Kitsch.
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Mar 6, 201240Stanton has been given the resources to create an expansive, expensive world, but lacks the instincts to direct live-action, a limitation that shows most in the performances. Bare of chest and fair of feature, Kitsch doesn't exhibit enough charisma to carry a project of this scale.
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25Interminably long, dull and incomprehensible, John Carter evokes pretty much every sci-fi classic from the past 50 years without having any real personality of its own.
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25Even Strong's best efforts can't save John Carter from collapsing in on itself like a dead star.
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25The opening to John Carter is a dud, a battle between airships made of woven bamboo, bursting into computer-generated flame over a sandy terrain. There's nothing to see, nothing to think about, nothing to care about, and nothing to feel, just emptiness. The emptiness is never filled over the course of 132 long, barren minutes.
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25Nothing in John Carter really works, since everything in the movie has been done so many times before, and so much better.
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20Dejah, with her seen-it-all-before smirk, is not a very sympathetic heroine, and Kitsch is stolid and dull. And as for the red planet, the answer to David Bowie's famous question is no. What a sadd'ning bore it is.
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16Most annoying is John Carter's scarcity of action. This much buck should buy more bang.
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12As film theorist Siegfried Kracauer once wrote, to paraphrase, art often blooms in the most hostile soil. No such luck here.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 150 out of 195
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Mixed: 24 out of 195
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Negative: 21 out of 195
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A bad action movie that's visual candy is rarely short, but it's stupidity in story line and plot pacing are it's major weaknesses.