Film Friday: John Carter (2012)

Based on the Edgar Rice Burroughs novel “A Princess of Mars,” John Carter is a fascinating film in a way. There’s really nothing wrong with it in a technical sense -- the effects, the acting, the plot (what there is of it) are all very standard for modern Hollywood films -- but the film stinks. How badly? How about $161-million-loss-and-the-Disney-studio-head-resigned bad. Let’s talk about why this film failed.

** spoiler alert **

John Carter ultimately fails for two reasons. For one thing, it’s entirely derivative. It offers nothing you haven’t seen done before, and done better. But more importantly, this film just has no hope of connecting with modern audiences.

Edgar Rice Burroughs’ fans are probably thinking of killing me for calling the film derivative, but it is. You’ve seen everything in this film before. The film looks just like the four-hour pod race in the middle of The Phantom Menace. The fight scenes come straight from the remake of Clash of the Titans, and Carter himself looks suspiciously like Conan. There is not a single original element or image in this film. This robs the film of any sense of grandeur, surprise or uniqueness, and in a summer tent pole film, that’s about all you have to offer.

Indeed, what this film feels like is Cowboys & Aliens, as both films are eerily similar in terms of look and feel and level of indifference. They both take place in the American West (though John Carter calls this Mars), they both feature Olivia Wilde as some alien princess who stands apart from her people (though the version in John Carter calls herself Lynn Collins), both have American Indians (though the John Carter version are green and hate the oppressive “Red Man”), both have a hero with a sort-of unexpected-by-him superpower which sets them apart from the other locals, and both pretend to have convoluted plots which really just boil down to “walk from point A to point B until the final fight. . . all dialog is gratuitous.” Both films even use nearly identical flashbacks to dead wives/girlfriends to try to create something for us to like about the duller-than-dirt heroes.

Now, to be fair to Burroughs, his novels came first. So all those other films stole from him, but that doesn’t help this film feel any fresher. And that is a problem. But the real problem with this film is actually a little more fundamental: this film just can’t connect with modern audiences because Burroughs wrote “A Princess of Mars” in 1917, and many of the ideas in it are anachronistic to us today because we know so much about Mars and because our view of alien cultures has morphed so much. Thus, a straight adaptation of the book simply won’t work today.

For one thing, the idea of an advanced culture where cities float on weightless platforms is something we have seen often by now, BUT it doesn’t make sense to us that the people who would build such wonders would live in primitive Roman-like conditions, with mud streets, togas for clothing, swords for weapons, and a complete and utter lack of any other technology. This worked for people in 1917, when the world longed for a return to a more primitive “enlightened” age, but not today when we love our conveniences. So right away, seeing people who are fundamentally more primitive than ourselves yet simultaneously have much more advanced technology strikes a modern audience as phony. They should have created a genuinely advanced society.

There are questions of physics as well. This film relies on the idea that Carter is basically a superhero on Mars because its lower gravity allows him to leap tall buildings in a single bound. BUT we’ve all seen the astronauts on the moon, which has even less gravity. Sure, they could hop around like children, but we never saw anything that would let them make laughably stupid beyond-the-horizon jumps like the ones the Incredible Hulk made in his last cartoon movie. Carter can, and that just isn’t believable to us. Not to mention that if this were the case, the people of Mars wouldn’t be shaped like us because their muscles would be about 1/100th the size, and Carter should be able to crush them with his hands. Yet, his strength seems to come and go depending on the needs of the scene. And this isn’t nitpicking, these are things that modern audiences will immediately see as fake and will have a hard time suspending their disbelief because they know better.

And while we’re talking about audience expectations, I am left to wonder why they didn’t make Mars appear red in John Carter. To the contrary, it looks like Utah. I think this was a mistake as well. For while we know that Mars does not appear red if you are standing on it, modern audiences really have been conditioned to see Mars as “the red planet.” Making it look just like Earth stripped the film of some of its uniqueness and turned the story of “Mars” into just some fantasy world, which made the references to Earth incongruous. It should have been red.

Moreover, while we’re on the issue of Earth, John Carter makes a mistake keeping the film set in the 1870s. There is simply no point to doing this because the technological or historical state of Earth is irrelevant to the film. Indeed, the introduction to the film feels like an unneeded period piece, particularly as it is entirely forgotten once he gets to Mars. And while I know some people are saying that’s who Carter is in the books, the point is that this is not made relevant to the movie and it only serves to make Carter less relatable to modern audiences, especially as he ends up looking like Conan for most of the film and never once acts like we have come to expect characters from that era to act. If he had acted like a Southerner from the Civil War era, then it might make sense to do this, but since he doesn’t, it only adds confusion and makes it harder for audiences to climb into his head. They should have made him modern.

So what you have here is a physical image of Mars that modern audiences don’t accept, a futuristic society that strikes modern audiences as laughably false, and a hero they cannot relate to because he comes from a period piece that has nothing in common with the modern world and then his period is jarringly thrown off so he can become a fake Conan. This is filmmaker negligence. This is why this film simply doesn’t resonate with modern audiences, and that’s even before you add the boredom factor of every single scene reminding the audience of some other film they’ve seen.

I’m sure there are people for whom John Carter was a great adaptation of a book they loved. But for everyone else, the film just doesn’t work. This is not a concept that will resonate with modern audiences. It is a niche film. Moreover, it’s a niche film you’ve already seen a dozen times and done better every time. That’s why this film failed.