John Carter… nevermore

John Carter
DIRECTED BY: Andrew Stanton
STARRING: Taylor Kitsch, Lynn Collins, Mark Strong, Dominic West, Willem Dafoe
CERT: 12A

I suppose it matters on some level that John Carter has been a massive financial failure; that several hundred million dollars have disappeared into a black hole. Certainly it matters to Disney, who didn’t exactly need another major flop after last year’s Mars Needs Moms. After two box office disasters in a row now, I can’t imagine the suits will be eager for another trip to Mars any time soon.
In that alternate industry universe, in that strange place where the funny money is king, John Carter is obviously a bad thing. For director Andrew Stanton, it is not exactly great, either. Stanton is a Pixar veteran, a man who won Oscars for Finding Nemo and WALL-E and who also directed A Bug’s Life. As a writer, he contributed to the three Toy Story films, as well as the excellent Monsters Inc. He is a man of undoubted talent but he might not have the fondest memories of his first venture into live action film.
So John Carter comes with baggage. For most of us, as usual, there is really only one thing that matters, only one question worth bothering with: is the film any good?
Yes.
Not good in the classic sense and not good in the way that Monsters Inc. is good, which you could say amounts to the same thing. It is not a science fiction epic for the ages but it’s good all the same, an entertaining yarn, an enjoyable enough way to spend a couple of hours. It could have been better and with Mr Stanton at the wheel it should have been, but it’s a bit late for that now. As a friend of mine never tires of saying, it is what it is.
John Carter is based on the novel, A Princess Of Mars, by Edgar Rice Burroughs, the first of a series of Carter books by the author, who became most famous as the creator of Tarzan.
Carter (Kitsch) is an American Civil War veteran, who gets himself mysteriously transported to Mars. It’s not exactly Mars as we know it, barren and uninhabitable, but Mars as Burroughs and his fellow pulp fiction writers imagined it, a hostile planet populated by green men and red men and others of various shapes, colours and ferocity. These locals call the planet Barsoom.
On Mars, Carter discovers he has a nifty new talent for the high jump, thanks to the planet’s lower gravity. He also finds that, in space, they’re fond of war too. The residents of Zadonga have it in for the relatively peace-loving citizens of Helium and the villainous Sab Than (West) has his eye on Helium’s princess, Dejah Thoris (Collins), a fine lady and a scary warrior.
Meanwhile, Carter is captured by a bunch of green, four-armed savages called Tharks, who have a fondness for Roman-style arena entertainment – the more barbaric the better. Their leader Tars (Dafoe) takes a liking to the Earthling, however, fascinated by his weird jumping abilities. The cave-dwelling Tharks have a fascination with Carter’s name, too, which you could call a running joke if it didn’t stop being funny after the first time.
Keeping track of who’s who and who wants to do exactly what to whom gets a bit convoluted and tedious but, as you knew he would, Carter joins forces with the lovely princess to save both the planet and the day.
The leads, Kitsch and Collins, don’t make a particularly memorable screen pair and none of the characters here will capture the imagination or remain in the memory in the same way that, say, Dory the fish did but everyone looks the part and looks like they’re having fun.
The action is good without being spectacular and visually, the film is great, sometimes even stunning. If it plays like a strange cross between Star Wars, Avatar and Superman, well, it has less to do with Stanton being a thief than it does with the fact that Mr Burroughs and his books were an inspiration for all of that stuff to begin with, all of a hundred years ago. So John Carter might have been the seminal film – it just happens to have been released 35 years too late. 
Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote 10 more Barsoom books and the plan was to make a series of films. But any kind of sequel to John Carter looks unlikely, unless it somehow manages to bring in the guts of a billion dollars.
Which I suppose could happen, just probably not on this planet.

The Raven
DIRECTED BY: John McTeigue
STARRING: John Cusack, Alice Eve, Luke Evans
CERT: 16

The Raven is another film that, with better writers and a director who had even a passing acquaintance with subtlety and the art of suspense, might have been great. As it is, this is a harmless distraction with notions about itself.
The notions come from the subject matter – the stories of the great Edgar Allen Poe. The setting is Baltimore, 1849 and there’s a killer doing the rounds who seems to be inspired by the writer’s dark work. So Poe (Cusack) himself is hauled in by Detective Emmett Fields (Evans) to help solve the case. Which becomes a tad urgent when Poe’s girlfriend Emily (Eve) is selected to reenact one of the writer’s more enduringly terrifying tales.
John Cusack is one of those actors who can make almost any film worth watching. He’s the best thing The Raven has going for it and he makes a decent stab at being Poe. 
But overall. the great man deserves better than this.