Just returned from seeing John Carter and I have to give it a minor thumbs-up. If you can see it during a matinee showing, it’s well worth it, full price, YMMV. Also, I avoided the 3D version.
Cast was fine, voice acting of the animated characters worked and they had some fine actors in supporting roles, especially the three from the HBO series Rome, Ciarán Hinds (Julius Caesar), James Purefoy (Marc Antony), and Nicholas Woodeson (Posca) were the ones I spotted outright. There may have been more.
The CG animation of the tharks, Woola, and the white apes were done extremely well. The articulation of 6- and 8-limbed creatures looked natural and their expressions and body language expressive and suitable to the story. Woola’s dog-like behavior may have been slightly over done but offered a nice light side-plot to the main story and a few laughs. The technology to have lifelike animated actors just gets better and better, and now real non-human beings can be created and filmed in ways that early directors of SF and fantasy films could only dream of. When Tars Tarkas slaps John Carter on the head and the audience laughs, the audience believes in the character. It’s not just animation anymore, it’s actors interacting.
SFBC wraparound cover by Frank Frazetta
I really need to re-read the original book to mark all the differences, but it seemed to hew to the spine of the original, with some updating to make the modern audience more accepting of the story. It expanded the originals foreword and afterward with some changes that didn’t seem necessary to me, but must have been to the director and scriptwriters.
If I had one major complaint it was in the spectacle of the thing.
It’s been almost 28 years and people are still trying to out do the original Dune movie in scope and visual effects. The large crowd scenes and armies in John Carter did nothing for me to enhance the story. My remembrance of the books was of a dying world, populations small, and the grandeur was in what Barsoom once was and not in what it currently is. Of course, you can’t sell small visuals to Hollywood, so everything has to be scaled up, enhanced, slowed down, hyper-realistic non-reality, for an action movie to have any chance of being made and getting to the public. But still, just because you can doesn’t mean you should. The visuals should enhance the story, not overpower it, or provide meaningless background mayhem when little to none is required.
So, not as well told or shown as I would have liked, but I knew going in that my expectations were too high. After a lifetime of waiting, how could they have ever been met? Still, I think it’s worth seeing on the big screen once.
