But was it really that bad? Well, no actually it wasn’t. In
fact I thought it was pretty good which is quite sad considering nobody saw it
because they figured it must be bad because of the unfortunate box office figures.
The movie is about a man, surprisingly called John Carter,
who is a bit of a loner living in the old West. While in an unwanted skirmish
between cowboys and Indians Carter ends up in a strange cave with stranger
spiderlike markings on the floor and walls. Whilst in the cave he’s attacked by
a random cloaked man from a divine cult, but he manages to kill him and ends up
warping to the planet Barsoom (Mars) thanks to an old artefact the cloaked man
had.
The rest of the movie focuses on how John Carter meets with
the several races of Mars in an attempt to return back to Earth which of course
results in him taking part in a massive war and deciding he rather prefers it
on Mars, and who wouldn’t when Lynn Collins is playing your love interest.
The story admittedly is a bit bizarre, essentially a group
of angels (including the random cloaked bloke on Earth) want to cause havoc on
Mars by giving a power-hungry human a ridiculously powerful weapon and the only
way to stop him is to get John Carter who, thanks to his background and
difference in gravity, is a badass and can jump phenomenally far. Up against
the power-crazed human is leader of the humans Tardos Mors (Ciarán Hinds) and
his warrior/scientist daughter Dejah Thoris (Lynn Collins).
I think John Carter is a pretty good movie, it has a far
better story than Avatar does and although it doesn’t have the impressive
establishing shots of James Cameron’s cash-cow its visuals generally match it
if not better it in places. Everything from the action to the plot, the acting,
the sound and the visuals is really good. Okay it isn’t the best film you’ll
ever see, but it’s definitely deserving of more credit than it received.
It annoys me a little that people wrote off John Carter
simply because it didn’t make much money. The only difference between this and
Avatar is the hype. One set box office records and became the highest grossing
film of all time; the other set records it would rather not have. It really
shows the impact marketing can have on how much money a film can make, not that
John Carter didn’t have a strategy, it just didn’t whip up the same bizarre
hype Avatar did, and the news about its poor box office sales simply acted as
the final nail in its coffin.
John Carter was a bit of a risky film, it’s something
different and it even attempted to set a film on the red planet, something that
has notoriously had no success whatsoever in movieland. It put story
over the razzle-dazzle and I’m really disappointed it didn’t do well because it
will only strangle originality in cinema even more.
Final Verdict: 3 Stars. A pretty accomplished movie that
deserved a lot better.
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