The film tosses at him one strange thing after another from Burroughs’s expansive imagination. But in John Carter, based on Edgar Rice Burroughs’s 1912 novel A Princess of Mars, Kitsch’s enthusiasm is infectious. The latter film from Peter Berg was a scraping-the-IP-barrel project that even a deep ensemble cast (including Kitsch, Alexander Skarsgård, Jesse Plemons, and Hamish Linklater) couldn’t save. And every moment relies on the roguish smile, gentle heroism, and tangible physicality of Taylor Kitsch, whose ascent to A-list stardom came to a thumping halt after the double-whammy box-office failures of John Carter and Battleship.
Every frame pushes the limits of contemporaneous special effects: the crowds of Tharks crowding desert camps and arenas, the large-scale battle scenes between dragonfly-winged ships. The result is a satisfyingly goofy throwback epic that uses the big feelings at its center - love, regret, courage - for immersion and intimacy.Įvery scene in filmmaker Andrew Stanton’s passion project pulses with vibrant life and megasize emotion: the Lawrence of Arabia–mimicking narrative of a military-trained white man being exalted by an Indigenous community, the capital-R Romance. Meticulously crafted and earnestly conceived, John Carter presents its protagonists as agents of chaotic good in a place and a time that don’t always reward such morality. And John Carter, the colossal bomb that lost Disney $200 million, now seems far from the creative disaster it was dismissed as back in 2012. Tron: Legacy is a fantastical neon dream with a soundtrack from Daft Punk that still resembles a frequency beamed in from a faraway world. Nicolas Cage is an utter delight as a modern-day Merlin in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time broke new ground in whitewashing, and The Lone Ranger’s leading duo of Armie Hammer and Johnny Depp now seems rather cursed.īut there are treasures hidden amid this era of rubble, too. Alice in Wonderland shaved minutes off all our lives by inventing a breakdancing Mad Hatter.
There was a brief, delightful time in the early 2010s, before the expanded Marvel Cinematic Universe and the Star Wars film franchise had fully secured their formulaic stranglehold on the blockbuster as we know it, when Walt Disney Pictures was still willing to get weird with its big-budget, live-action theatrical releases. Head to Vulture’s Twitter to catch the live commentary.
This week’s selection comes from writer Roxana Hadadi, who will begin her screening of John Carter on March 9 at 7 p.m.
#RETURN TO BARSOOM MOVIE#
Photo: Walt Disney Studios Motion PicturesĮvery two weeks for the foreseeable future, Vulture will be selecting a film to watch with our readers as part of our Wednesday Night Movie Club.
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