Poised to plunge into distribution tomorrow, Disney’s elaborately retro space opera “John Carter” is the movie that dares to ask, “Would a Princess of Mars ever consider marriage to a wayward Virginia cavalryman?” It’s a proposal worthy of Newt Gingrich. Still, this quarter-billion dollar, retrofitted 3D production is hardly the “Waterworld”-scale debacle that many feared (or hoped).
Far from it. For the most part, the first “live action” feature by Andrew Stanton (director of the CGI animations “Finding Nemo” and “WALL-E”), adapted from a century-old Edgar Rice Burroughs pulp novel with a script polished by Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Chabon (who is doubtless responsible for the relatively dignified, not entirely cringe-inspiring, dialogue), is graphically splendiferous and enjoyably nonsensical.
An unreconciled Confederate turned Indian-fighter and all-around hothead, John Carter (Canadian hunk Taylor Kitsch) is mysteriously teleported to planet Barsoom (that’s Mars to us). This desert world is in environmental and political crisis, populated by several mutually hostile species, including the four-armed green giant Tharks (the most personable one played by Willem Dafoe) and monstrous white apes as well as a lissome Pocahontas named Dejah Thoris (classically-trained hottie Lynn Collins).
The action is involving for about an hour (picking up again for a spectacular climax), but the graphics, some inspired by the original illustrator Frank Schoonover, seldom flag. Like “Avatar,” “John Carter” is something of a crypto Western, albeit with even less subtext. (If you’re looking for that, “Gunfighter Nation,” Richard Slotkin’s magisterial study of the American frontier myth, devotes 16 pages to unpacking the racial and imperial fantasies found in Burroughs’ Barsoom novels.) In any case, America rules. Once on the red planet Carter discovers that he has super-strength, able to defeat entire armies and leap canyons in a single bound; as his initials suggest, he’s some sort of savior. (The theology seems to be a bit jumbled — the most simpatico of the multi-digited green things insists on referring to JC as “Virginia.”)
John Carter redeems Barsoom from its eco disaster (or should in the sequel). But can “John Carter” pump new life into the dying planet Hollywood? The movie looks to get Loraxed at the box office. I saw it in a curiously depopulated morning screening less than a week after an early tracking report had, per Nikki Finke, put the industry in “a tizzy.” (“Women of all ages have flat out rejected the film,” she was told by an anonymous executive.) Dejah Thoris’s sword-skill notwithstanding, it’s boy’s stuff — as made clear by the thunderous mid-Superbowl ad. The John Carter stories have inspired any number of comic strips and comic books over the past decades; “Princess of Mars” is even scheduled for republication by the Library of America, raising the question of whether there is anything that cannot be so canonized. (I’m looking forward to the inclusion of Ayn Rand, Milt Gross, and the novels of Oscar Micheaux.) The real question for Disney: Is there space for its ancillary items on the toy shelf between the “Star Wars” and “Avatar” merch?
Gotta say, though, that two other Barsoomptive projects are more fun to imagine than the Stanton-Chabon opus. In the mid ‘30s, Bob Clampett, the wackiest of Looney Tunes directors, shot test footage for a never-realized feature animation that, had it been completed might have beaten Disney’s “Snow White and the Seven Dwarves” into the record books. Some 20 years later, stop-motion genius Ray Harryhausen similarly floated the idea of a John Carter adaptation. Teleported to the planet of unmade mash-ups, I’d consider paying $18 to see Porky Pig battle the Skeleton Swordsman of Soukarah on the reds sands of Mars.
Hey kids, why not create your own? Find Clampett’s 1938 “Porky in Wackyland” here and the trailer for the Harryhausen-enriched “The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad” here.
Read more J. Hoberman in Movie Journal