Disney spent years trying to put Edgar Rice Burroughs on screen. When it finally did, in 2012, it handed the job to a Pixar director making his live-action debut and a cast stacked with British villains. The result, John Carter, is a machine that runs on a plot it never bothers to explain.
Trailer, via Disney UK.
Andrew Stanton’s Live-Action Debut
Andrew Stanton directed Finding Nemo and WALL-E. John Carter was his first live-action film, and he pressed Disney to renew the screen rights from the Burroughs estate. He took the director’s chair in 2009. He wrote the first draft of the screenplay with Pixar colleague Mark Andrews; Michael Chabon came on to revise it.
The film is based on A Princess of Mars, the first book in the Barsoom series. It runs 132 minutes. Its tagline is “Lost in our world, found in another.” That line promises a clean fish-out-of-water story. The film does not deliver one.
A Confederate Captain in the Arizona Territory
The plot opens in 1881. Edgar Rice Burroughs arrives at the estate of his recently deceased uncle, John Carter. Carter was a former Confederate Army captain in the American Civil War. His body goes into a tomb that can be unlocked only from the inside.
Carter’s attorney hands Burroughs a journal. Carter left him his fortune. The film then flashes back to 1868 in the Arizona Territory, where Union Colonel Powell arrests Carter in hopes he will help fight local Apache.
Carter escapes his holding cell. Cavalry soldiers chase him. After a run-in with a band of Apaches, Carter and a wounded Powell hide in a cave full of gold. A mysterious man appears and attacks them with a knife. Carter kills him, but activates the man’s medallion and is transported to Barsoom, known to Carter as Mars.
The planet is ruined and dying. Because of his different bone density and the planet’s lower gravity, Carter can jump high and perform feats of incredible strength. The Tharks, a nomadic tribe of Green Martians, capture him, along with their Jeddak, Tars Tarkas.
Two Cities, a Thousand Years of War
Elsewhere on Barsoom, the Red Martian cities of Helium and Zodanga have been at war for a thousand years. Sab Than, Jeddak of Zodanga, carries a weapon obtained from the Thern leader Matai Shang. He proposes a cease-fire: an end to the war by marrying the Princess of Helium, Dejah Thoris.
The Princess escapes. Carter rescues her. Carter, Dejah and Tarkas’s daughter Sola reach a spot in a sacred river to find a way for Carter to get back to Earth. There they learn the medallions are powered by a “ninth ray” that is also the source of Sab Than’s weapon. The Warhoon, a vicious race under Shang’s direction, then attack them.
That is the whole engine of the film: a magic medallion, a ninth ray, a wedding as a weapon, and a hero who only wants to go home. It should be simple. It is not.
Taylor Kitsch and Lynn Collins
Taylor Kitsch plays John Carter. Stanton cast him after seeing a scene in the Friday Night Lights television series, where Kitsch’s character, angry, is left behind by the bus. Stanton said the pose echoed Carter on a book cover in his collection.
Lynn Collins plays Dejah Thoris. She is a Juilliard graduate, and this was her first major movie role. She tested with many actors, including Josh Duhamel, using a scene where she slaps Carter in the face. That scene was filmed but cut.
Taylor and I have always had incredible chemistry. It was inevitable that we would get a chance to really explore it and work as a team.
That is Collins on Kitsch, her co-star in X-Men Origins: Wolverine.
The Supporting Cast
The supporting cast is deep and, in this paper’s view, mostly wasted. Samantha Morton plays Sola, a Thark who works with John Carter. Willem Dafoe plays Tars Tarkas, the Jeddak of the Tharks and Sola’s father. Thomas Haden Church plays Tal Hajus, a vicious Thark who dislikes Carter and Tars Tarkas. Mark Strong plays Matai Shang, the Hekkador of the Therns. Ciarán Hinds plays Tardos Mors, the Jeddak of Helium and Dejah Thoris’ father.
The list continues:
- Dominic West as Sab Than, the Jeddak of Zodanga
- James Purefoy as Kantos Kan, the Odwar of the ship Xavarian
- Bryan Cranston as Colonel Powell, a Union colonel who wants Carter to help his U.S. cavalry soldiers against the Apache
- Polly Walker as Sarkoja, a merciless Thark who hates Sola
The list is long. The roles are not.
Stanton’s Problem With His Own Hero
Stanton knew Carter’s backstory as a Confederate officer might be a problem for modern audiences. He envisioned the character as disillusioned and disgusted with war in general, apart from the side he fought on.
“I wanted to not absolve him of that, but also not make him pro the side he was on,” Stanton said. “The best I could do was neutralize him.”
That is a real admission, and it explains a lot. A neutral hero is a hero with nothing to fight for.
Stanton also said he had no grand design for the cast, other than having the villains played by British actors. “I knew that the cast was going to grow with creatures and it was going to grow with different types of races if we were to continue,” he said. “And it was going to get a little more fantastical.”
Disney began a concerted effort to adapt Burroughs’ works in the late 2000s, after an abandoned venture in the 1980s. The project was driven by Stanton. The studio got one movie.
The Barsoom That Never Got Made
Attempts to adapt the Barsoom series go back to the 1930s. Major studios and producers tried, and most of those efforts stalled in development hell. Disney made an abandoned attempt in the 1980s, then began a concerted effort in the late 2000s.
That history is the film’s real problem. John Carter carries the weight of every version that never happened. In this paper’s reading, it spends its running time on the ninth ray, the Therns, the wedding, the war, the Tharks and the medallions, and it still feels like the second film in a trilogy.
The film is titled on-screen as John Carter of Mars. The marketing used the shorter name. That is a small thing, and it may be the whole thing. The title the studio sold was the title without the planet in it.
The Verdict on John Carter
John Carter is not a bad movie. It is an unmade one. The pieces are here: a director with a real eye, a cast that could carry three films, and a source novel that invented half of what we now call science fiction. What is missing is a reason to care.
The film’s best idea is the one it buries. Carter’s strength comes from his different bone density and the planet’s lower gravity, not from virtue. He is a man who can leap because the planet is small. That is a clean, physical metaphor for a soldier who has been made useless by peace, and in this paper’s view the film never uses it.
Instead we get a ninth ray, a medallion, a wedding, a cave of gold, and a war that has run for a thousand years without either side explaining what they are fighting over. The Tharks are the most interesting people on Barsoom, and in this paper’s view they get the least time to prove it. Tars Tarkas is Sola’s father, and that relationship is better than anything Carter does.
Kitsch is fine. Collins is better than the material. Dafoe, under the prosthetics, finds something sad in Tars Tarkas. These performances do not save the film, but they make the waste visible.
This is the part worth watching: the film’s failure, in this paper’s view, is not that it was too strange. It is that it was not strange enough. Stanton came to this material from animation, where a ninth ray can be anything. Here it is just a glowing object that needs explaining, and the explaining is what sinks it.
John Carter is 132 minutes long, and it plays like a trailer for a franchise that never arrived. It is worth seeing once, for the cast and for what might have been. It is not worth seeing twice.
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