{"id":280,"date":"2012-03-13T02:12:27","date_gmt":"2012-03-13T02:12:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/movieox.com\/?p=280"},"modified":"2012-03-13T02:15:58","modified_gmt":"2012-03-13T02:15:58","slug":"john-carter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/movieox.com\/?p=280","title":{"rendered":"John Carter"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve always wanted to see Princess of Mars<\/em> made into a movie.\u00a0 But Disney got ahold of the rights.\u00a0 Damnit.<\/p>\n

First, let me say what’s good about the film.\u00a0 The cast is awesome.\u00a0 Everyone is perfectly cast, and if a few other things were different this could have been the epic to end all epics.\u00a0 Taylor Kitsch is easily believable as a confederate cavalryman turned prospector.\u00a0 Lynn Collins is great as the princess.\u00a0 And the two are clearly made to wear loincloths.\u00a0 For the most part, I even thought they nailed the look (though they should have looked at Alan Moore’s take in League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Vol. 2<\/em> because they still got owned).\u00a0 But sadly, having the correct cast and look (almost) makes John Carter<\/em> even more of a tragedy.<\/p>\n

Now, I’m pretty sure critics don’t even watch the movies because nobody (film drew poor reviews for the most part) who panned the thing mentioned anything except that it cost too much to make.\u00a0 So you have my permission not to read them.\u00a0 What was really wrong with the movie was its cuddliness.\u00a0 The latest iteration of Conan had this same problem.\u00a0 One should not try to make a cuddly film from harsh source material.\u00a0 John Carter<\/em> was not a nice person.\u00a0 He was a broken, evil man.\u00a0 His adventures on Mars redeemed his spirit but he was a conqueror, not a hero.\u00a0 He was Caesar not Jesus.<\/p>\n

This could have been a terrifying, inspiring, sprawling epic.\u00a0 The 4 armed, warrior like Tharks (correctly realized) could beat the shit out of the smurfs from Avatar.\u00a0 But neither Disney, nor Andy Stanton (director of Finding Nemo<\/em> and Wall-E<\/em>) have the stomach to create characters that aren’t friendly or a movie without a clear good and bad.<\/p>\n

I thought this movie was going to nail it at first, when the film starts on earth a Federal Cavalry Captain is trying to force John Carter to join up to fight Apache.\u00a0 But John Carter is such a hard boiled prick, they can’t get him to budge.\u00a0 They imprison him, he escapes.\u00a0 Repeatedly.\u00a0 But once on Mars (I’m not going to cover how that happens, read a book) everything is cuddly and the good guys are identifiable by their non aggressive colors, and boring.\u00a0 A scene where John Carter employs his superior strength (Earth’s gravity is stronger so on Mars John Carter is about 10 times stronger than everyone else) to murder around 1,000 Tharks in pitched battle should have been exciting.\u00a0 But it was not.\u00a0 It was boring, because nothing was at stake, nobody was seriously convinced the cuddly aliens could actually hurt him.<\/p>\n

The movie isn’t terrible, its just tragic to finally have a John Carter film and have it be this.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve always wanted to see Princess of Mars made into a movie.\u00a0 But Disney got ahold of the rights.\u00a0 Damnit. First, let me say what’s good about the film.\u00a0 The cast is awesome.\u00a0 Everyone is perfectly cast, and if a … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-280","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-review"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieox.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieox.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieox.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieox.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieox.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=280"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/movieox.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":358,"href":"https:\/\/movieox.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280\/revisions\/358"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieox.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=280"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieox.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=280"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieox.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=280"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}