John Carter

Two nights ago, Evan and I went to see John Carter, the generically named movie about a guy who goes to Mars. Also, he fights stuff. We took Steve along with us, because he's actually read the source material (Evan's read some of it. I ignored it completely). It's written by the same guy who wrote Tarzan, about a billion years ago.

Evan got the preview game because of the Avengers. We tied on Brave and Wrath of the Titans. All three movies are on our list, but Brave might slip off, depending on if we want to go see a Pixar movie or not.

The movie starts off at the end, actually, with Edgar Rice Burroughs (the author of the books) getting a telegram (did I mention it's set in 1882?) from his uncle, John Carter. There are some very specific instructions in the will, one of which involves Carter's diary. As Burroughs starts reading, it flashes back 13 years and tells the main story.

Carter is looking for a cave of gold, with which he'll do something. We don't know what, but I imagine it has to do with drinking so much alcohol he'll forget his dead wife (died in a fire, possibly set by union soldiers, but I don't know). He gets arrested and offered a job, which he turns down and then promptly escapes from jail.

He's pursued by the posse until he runs into some Apaches. Everyone starts killing each other, so Carter takes off. The sheriff (Bryan Cranston!) takes a shot somewhere on his person (is he clutching his side? his arm? his abdomen? His Medula Oblongata? His Duodenum?) so Carter rescues him and drags him into a cave. The apache's give chase, but run off when they see the inscription above the cave. Carter goes spelunking with the world's longest lasting match (seriously. It burns for over a minute. That thing is awesome) and finds his cave full of gold, along with a bunch of spider inscriptions. Suddenly, a figure appears. The sheriff shouts a warning, and Carter shoots the figure. It drops a medallion of some sort. Carter picks it up while the figure lays dying. It spouts some nonsense, which Carter repeats while trying to understand, and the medallion lights up. BOOM! Carter wakes up in the desert.

He looks around and slowly clambers to his feet, but when he tries to walk, he takes a flying leaps and lands on his face. And this is by far the best (and funniest) way of portraying a difference in gravity. How many worlds in Star Wars had different gravity than Earth? Tons, but none on screen (seriously, how did the asteroid in Empire Strikes Back have Earth-like gravity at all? It’s a freaking asteroid). Same with Star Trek. And many other movies. It's possible that a large chunk of the $250 million budget was used to realistically portray weaker gravity (Wikipedia lists it as a little over 1/3 of Earth's, but I don't think Burrough's knew that when he wrote this).

Of course, more of the budget was spent on the large aliens that soon show up. Oh, hey look! It's the plot! Soon there's a princess and rescues and arranged marriages and tyrants and villains, and an arena scene suspiciously similar to Attack of the Clones (hero fights monsters in a desert arena cheered on by multi-limbed aliens). Mind you, it's possible that George Lucas simply ripped off (homaged, please) the original source material. So who knows?

Anyway, there's a lot of fights, what is scientifically known as a metric f***ton of special effects, and very little character development. So it was pretty much exactly my type of movie. There were only a few problems. The biggest is that the music is competent, but nothing special. Don't bother getting the soundtrack. Maybe I'm just not giving it the benefit of the doubt, because I've been spoiled by the score for Mass Effect 3. But there were scenes where the score really could have added something special, and it didn't.

Besides that, the plot is somewhat longer than most plots, with a lot of things happening to the main character. Mind you, in pulp science fiction, that's what happened. Things just keep happening at a breakneck pace, until finally the book ends with the guy getting the girl. They weren't into things like plot details and character development back then. Just good, old-fashioned action. My kind of stuff. You know, if I can get around the old-timey lingo and zeerust.

So I tab this as a theatre movie. I doubt that Evan or Steve will have the same opinion, having read the source material, but maybe ignorance is bliss after all. They spent the car ride home comparing notes and complaining that the bad guys aren't actually like that at all, whereas I spent the time laughing at the jokes in the movie and pretending I was in Mars gravity.