Really expensive nonsense
“Only enormously talented people could have made "Death to
Smoochy." Those with lesser gifts would have lacked the nerve to make a
film so bad, so miscalculated, so lacking any connection with any possible
audience. To make a film this awful, you have to have enormous ambition and
confidence, and dream big dreams.”
-
Roger Ebert
The explanation of why "John Carter of Mars" exists is better than the
movie itself. It’s director Andrew Stanton is best known as one of the great
creative forces behind the golden age of Pixar. He was a cowriter for all three
Toy Story movies and directed both “Finding Nemo,” and “Wall-E.” To a movie
lover like me he is arguably one of the greatest living directors and I would
put “Wall-E” on a list of the 100 best movies ever made. To studios he
represents enormous profits, both “Toy Story” and “Finding Nemo” having broken
box office records for animated movies. So when Andrew Stanton came to the
producers at Disney with an idea for a science fiction/comic book movie with
lots of violence and exotic locations, who in their right mind would say no.
They granted Stanton full access to the Disney playground. $250 million dollars
later in production value and $100 million dollars later in marketing produced
the movie that last week grossed only $30 million and is destined to be one of
the biggest flops of the year. What went wrong? Well, for one thing, the movie
isn’t any good. But how could that happen? (See above). There are two main problems both of which could have been solved by a cigar-chomping asshole producer with only dollars for
eyeballs. Those people are good for something.
The first big problem is way too much faithfulness to the source
material. This movie is based on more than a century old comic book series. In
this book we are introduced to made up weapons, made up languages, made up
peoples, made up places, made up cultural customs, made up powers, made up gods
and goddesses. Everything is nothing I had ever heard of before. When a
character dramatically intones that they have to find the ninth ring of iths
from the gates of Barsoon before the tharks release the giant white ape and the
thurns shapeshift for the red man blue man widget marraige at Helium, my
reaction is like, “Huh? What?” And this sort of thing goes on for much of the
movie. They keep throwing in new shit, giving no explanation or time for it to
sink in, and then expecting big dramatic payoffs. A very big problem has to do with
the story’s technology. People in flying warships are fighting with swords
while big green men on the ground have calvary and guns. Then there are these
other dudes that have the ability to shapeshift and vaporize anything within a
few seconds using a blue widget thingy. I haven’t the slightest idea what that
thingy is or why nobody else has it or why it was not used in the battles far
more often. This movie could have been a lot shorter if the blue vaporizer thingy
had not been used so sparingly. Then there is John Carter himself, a civil war
veteran from Earth, transported to Mars via a little thingy, to find that his
Earth muscles provide him with superior abilities on Mars’ lower gravity.
Basically, he is super strong and can jump really high. But how high can he
jump? The movie is very very unclear about that. At points it is just a few
meters, but at other times it could very well be a football field. It is this
critics opinion that for action sequences to be effective, the laws of physics
must be followed, even when it is on Mars, or if they are to be bent they are bent in a clear and predictable manner (See “The Matrix.” Do not see “Matrix
Reloaded” or “Matrix Revolutions.”) Otherwise nothing makes sense and the
story’s momentum and suspense deflates. The suspension of disbelief gone we are
merely witnessing an actor in a weird costume skipping around a room with a green screen.
That actor would be Taylor Kitsch a remarkably bad choice in casting
whose responsibility for the failure of the movie is only somewhat alleviated
by the even worse choice of Lynn Collins, as the Martian princess. Put these
two together and you have some of the most horribly acted scenes I have seen in
a long time. And you cannot merely just say that the material was arcane and
stilted. Sure they are speaking about weird lore and strange happenings but
that still doesn’t forgive the utter lack of excitement or range in the
performances. Let’s say a horde of green Martian barbarians was descending upon
you for the express purpose of killing you. Perhaps your facial expression and
body language should suggest you were doing anything other than posing for the Mars
version of GQ magazine. Or consider John Carter’s reaction to learning that he
is on Mars for the first time. That Taylor Kitsch reminded me of a young Keanu
Reeves, and that is about the worst compliment you can give an actor. One of
the producers of this movie should have required that Andrew Stanton cast a
well-known action star as the lead in his $250 million dollar epic. This is not
simply a cynical attempt at more dollars via a better marketing platform. “John
Carter of Mars,” is Stanton’s first live-action movie. He had never worked with
actors before. If the director casts unknowns who do not know what they are
doing, guess who has the responsibility to teach them what to do: the director.
And if the director does not know how to direct actors and the actors do not
know how to act, what you get is this silly drivel, made even sillier as it is
being performed against a backdrop of a ridiculously expensive, intricate, and
extensive amount of costume, makeup, CGI work, set design, and production
value. What a colossal fuck-up this was.
I keep thinking back to that other live action foray by an acclaimed
Pixar director, Brad Bird’s “Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol.” Whatever
similar problems Bird may have had were alleviated by a familiar and franchised
story that took place in present day and was anchored by Tom Cruise, who is,
private weirdness aside, quite frankly one of the best actors in the business,
and may very well be the best action actor. For future studio reference, the
next time a great director wants to spend an extremely large amount of money on
something he has never done before with a bunch of inexperienced collaborators,
it might be a good idea to sign him up for two movies and make the first one a
much less expensive test run.
