This movie, because of its huge budget and lowly returns, will forever be known as one of the costliest flops in cinema history. Yet that doesn’t mean it’s a bad movie. Like most movies it’s fair to middling, with not enough money spent on the script and far too much spent on computer-generated effects. But because it is such a financial flop John Carter is being pretty thoroughly skewered by critics, and I think this fact deserves some attention.
Whether anyone wants to admit it or not, the budget of a film has little relevance to a film’s quality. Great movies have been made on proverbial shoestrings while a great many bloated-budget blockbusters stink of excess. This has always been true and it will always be true.
This next statement may come as blasphemy to some, but it is equally true: the amount of money a movie makes has little relevance to its quality. Great movies have made next to nothing while some of Hollywood’s biggest hits are inane tripe. Yet, the past couple of decades of widespread reporting of Hollywood’s financial aspects has generally replaced genuine movie criticism in the public eye as a barometer of any film’s quality. Specifically, “opening weekend” figures often determine whether a film is considered a success or failure, regardless of how the movie plays over time, or how good the film is artistically.
This is certainly true for John Carter, which has “underperformed” at the box office since its opening, and which has set itself up for ridicule for years. But let’s look at it with clear eyes for a moment. Why would its studio (Disney) ever believe that this was a blockbuster project? John Carter is an odd mix of action, science-fiction and history, based on an Edgar Rice Burroughs novel more than a century old. The film features no big stars and eventually cost more than five major motion pictures ought to (some $250 million). Who in their right mind would have spent so much money making this? How many people did they actually think would want to see it?
Burroughs wrote several different novel series — most famously Tarzan — and the “Princess of Mars / John Carter of Mars” series is quite famous, too. Nevertheless, it has rarely been filmed (the same story was used for Princess of Mars in 2009, with Traci Lords) because movie studios and producers were smart enough to see it had limited appeal. Burroughs also wrote a series about an inner Earth kingdom known as Pellucidar, which, though inspiring a couple of movies, has experienced the same neglect. Some literary creations simply don’t transfer well to film, and John Carter is a prime example. The fact is that it should probably never have been made, at least not with such a huge budget and such high expectations.
That said, I kind of liked it. I respect Andrew Stanton for the audacity of trying to bring a sword-and-sandal story to life on the deserts of Mars, even if there was virtually no chance that people would care about it. Taylor Kitsch (who?) is okay as Carter, though he seems anachronistic in the post-Civil War scenes. I like Lynn Collins a lot as Dejah Thoris; she was a highlight for me no matter how trite the dialogue she was forced to speak. Visually the film was interesting, although Mars (Barsoom) seemed quite Arizona-like much of the time. And there was one specific sequence where the editing was top-notch, providing emotional context to the story for the first and only time.
But the script was flimsy and weak, failing to explain some Barsoom traditions and customs at all, while emphasizing the same familiar heroic situations we have come to expect of these “stranger in a strange land” scenarios. At 132 minutes the film is too long by a good half hour. And finally it is impossible not to return to the source material, which most people, myself included, find outdated and silly. Stanton’s film tries to reconcile these issues, but doesn’t succeed very well. Nevertheless, it should be judged on what it is, not how much it cost or how much it made (or, in this case, didn’t make). ✰ ✰. 24 March 2012.