John Carter
Directed By:
Andrew Stanton
Written By:
Andrew Stanton, Mark Andrews, and Michael Chabon
Starring: Taylor
Kitsch, Lynn Collins, Dominic West, Mark Strong, Bryan Cranston, and the voices
of Willem Dafoe, Samantha Morton, and Thomas Hayden Chuch
Director of Photography: Dan Mindel, Editor: Eric
Zumbrunnen, Production Designer: Nathan Crowley, Original Music: Michael
Giacchino
Rated: PG-13 for
your standard sci-fi spectacle action.
Have
you heard? John Carter is the latest
disaster from Disney! It’s an overbloated sci-fi spectacular full of ridiculous
characters who have unpronounceable names! It’s overstuffed with CGI that’s
there for the sake of more! It cost over $250 million, and if it fails, we’ll
never see the likes of it again! Yay, us!
If
you read anything on John Carter this
week, which is a very big and costly science fiction epic from Disney, it
probably read something like this. And because what the film looks like on its
surface, it is certainly easy to pile on the film for representing everything
wrong with mainstream filmmaking. Certainly Disney has a trend of these
“franchise booter” films since Pirates of
the Caribbean, none of which have spawned sequels (see: The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, Prince of Persia, and Tron: Legacy), and John Carter is certainly written with bookends in order to demand
sequel territory. But to dismiss John
Carter so easily is to dismiss the grounds the film’s director, Pixar alum
Andrew Stanton, wants his audience to approach the film. You have to take the
drama as intensely as its characters do, and once you give into the power of John Carter, it’s a wild ride on the red
desert.
