This is just from the perspective of story. It’s not perfect–the pacing to me seemed a tad off towards the end, it could have benefited from a bit more in the way of a preface, and I actually felt it was a bit short (although how often does Hollywood make 3-hour epics today?!)–but it’s a great film especially by current standards. There is a sense of realness to the characters that allows the surprisingly character-driven John Carter to excel. Once you get past the desire to make ill-conceived comparisons, what you have is a griping story filled with memorable and captivating supporting characters, fully developed main characters, and plenty of personality and humanity to give life to an incredibly vivid epic landscape of Mars. Even those are loose comparisons at best. In any case, if critics are desirous of drawing comparisons between John Carter and other films, the much more apt comparisons, to me, are to Lawrence of Arabia, Barry Lyndon, and a few different Akira Kurosawa films. (As if “normal” fiction is always so firmly rooted in reality!) I really don’t know how else to explain why science fiction is so easily dismissed as unoriginal whereas dramas (and other genres) are not.
I think there’s an unfair prejudice and stigma towards science fiction. Perhaps this is because science fiction is not as mainstream or ‘normal’ of a genre as drama. Many dramas follow similar story arcs and storytelling devices, yet they do not receive the same criticism for being unoriginal. To me, this seems not only unfair, but inaccurate. Science fiction films seem much more susceptible to this type of criticism than, say, dramas, as any science fiction film invariably seems to draw comparisons to Star Wars and other films in the pantheon of sci fi classics. It actually puzzles me that John Carter has been labeled as unoriginal. I think the more legitimate response to the “unoriginal” criticism is that, even when viewing it against those films to which it has been compared, John Carter is far from unoriginal. That said, if you’re making a John Carter film, in order to be faithful to the source material, you have to include certain cornerstone scenes that may now be viewed as cliche to the genre because they’ve been borrowed from the novels so many times. If your goal as a filmmaker is to do something no one has ever done before, you don’t choose to base your film on source material that has since been borrowed from by many other films (and I’m not implying that was Stanton’s goal). Comparing films-to-films, all of those titles preceded this. To be honest, I don’t really buy that line of reasoning advanced by John Carter fans. The response to this has been that John Carter’s 100-year old source material (pulp novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs) actually inspired all those films, so John Carter was not actually inspired by those films, but rather, they were inspired by it. Because of this, critics have dismissed it as being unoriginal. It has drawn comparisons to Avatar, the Star Wars prequels, Gladiator, and a few other mediocre contemporary films. Since John Carter is such a divisive film, I’d rather focus my energy on why John Carter is actually an amazing film that deserves so much more attention than it received.Īs mentioned above, John Carter has been divisive. If not, 5 minutes on Google might be in order to gain some frame of reference for how John Carter has been received by critics and the public. You also probably know that John Carter has been deemed a flop, and that many scratched their heads over its bizarre marketing. You can read about that on Wikipedia or the thousands of other articles that have preceded this. I’m not going to waste keystrokes on the plot of John Carter. The story and character development in John Carter are very enjoyable, and with that essential foundation laid, the visual depth (and I don’t mean visual effects) then takes the film to the next level. Throughout the commentary, Stanton and the films producers harp on the burden borne by the visuals in John Carter, and for me, they completely hit the nail on the head. It’s an epic period film rife with layers of rich detail that sticks with an astute viewer, and really takes a few viewings to fully absorb. I want it to feel like we’ve just done our martian history research really, really well.” Director Andrew Stanton made this comment in the audio commentary to the John Carter Blu-ray, and it perfectly sums up why John Carter succeeds for me.
“I just want a period film about a period I don’t know anything about.
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