REVIEW: John Carter (2012)

Box office disasters are a funny thing.  Film history is dotted with them, from Heaven's Gate (which killed off big-budget Hollywood auteurism for the next...ever) to The Adventures of Pluto Nash (which somehow did nothing stem the flow of bad Eddie Murphy family flicks).  John Carter was a disaster everyone saw coming, but not until too late.  Even before the movie came out, before there was a critical consensus or a wide audience got to weigh in, articles were hitting the trades urging everyone to brace for impact, and explaining what went wrong.

The saga reads like a clusterfuck of studio politics and mismarketing.  Disney had spent $250 million on a relatively obscure Edgar Rice Burroughs novel known only to dedicated sci-fi fans.  They changed the title (originally, it was the somewhat-more-salty John Carter of Mars) to the least vivid name imaginable, reportedly because recent movies with "Mars" in title, from Mission to Mars and Mars Needs Moms, had all been flops.  In the ads, they shied away from mentioning the most marketable aspect of the film: that it was directed by Andrew Stanton, a key member of the Pixar braintrust and the man behind Wall-E and Finding Nemo.  And the result was a very expensive movie on a collision course with the multiplexes, but with no marquee stars, little buzz, and a small built-in fanbase.  It opened earlier this year to mixed reviews and an exceedingly poor box office performance for a film of its size.  It became a notorious punchline as the flop of the year, and its failure caused Rich Ross, the head of Walt Disney Studios, to resign.

But the funny thing about John Carter is that, aesthetically speaking, it's not much of a disaster at all.  Don't get me wrong—it's not particularly good.  But it's not particularly bad either, and I've seen worse movies that became hits.  Hell, I've seen worse movies that won top prizes at Sundance or got nominated for Best Picture.  Its flaws: the acting may not be the best (Taylor Kitsch is trying to out-Keanu Keanu), it's almost certainly too long for what it is, and its mythology pours forth in a jumble of names—Tharks, Therns, Zodanga, The 9th Ray—that never quite connects.

But it creates (or at least attempts) an innocent, early-20th-century brand of pulp: the kind of "golly, gee" speculative fiction perched between the modern and pre-modern worlds that gave us not just Borroughs, but Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, early Fritz Lang, Hergé, and H.P. Lovecraft.  That alone makes it a welcome alternative the shiny, cynical, metallic bombast of, say, Battleship, which flopped here but picked up overseas.  Even John Carter's sense of campiness, which will turn off much of the teen demographic, feels like less of a constriction than a deliberate choice.  (This is, after all, not an inexpensive movie).  Indeed, you can see it as a throwback to the old Ray Harryhausen-tinged matinee fantasies of 50 years ago—and for my money, it's more coherent than Jason and the Argonauts, even if its missing skeletons.  Just think of getting to see McNulty from The Wire wearing a tacky Ancient-Rome-meets-1950s-futurism costume as a kind of bonus.

So what's the main message of the John Carter disaster?  Heads have already rolled.  It can be seen as a knock against tentpoles: it's public evidence that you can't just license a property, throw hundreds of millions of dollars at world-building special effects, and expect everyone to show up.  An optimistic cynic might hope that this would dent the tentpole system and help break the cycle of always rolling the $200 million dice to try to create a franchise.  But I fear not.  Instead, I fear the failure of John Carter sends the message that even an Edgar Rice Burroughs cult classic isn't safe enough—if you want to be safe, you need a Johnny Depp-level cast or a fanbase as rock solid as The Avengers or Batman, a post-Nolan reboot of which is already being discussed.  There are a lot more digital epics to come, and John Carter, despite the red ink, may well be one of the better ones.

3 out of 5 stars.

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John Carter is now on DVD, and it's actually not that bad.