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John Carter (of Mars) - March 9 2012 - (with Canadian Taylor Kitsch on Barsoom!)

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Aloysius J. Gleek:


Woah. I forgot  how
Eee-vil the Evil Queen
was!![youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkaOpI1S4Tk[/youtube]

Aloysius J. Gleek:



http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/john-carter-film-review-297041





John Carter
Film Review
Director Andrew Stanton's Disney extravaganza
is a rather charming pastiche, if perhaps not one
with sufficient excitement and razzle-dazzle to justify
the reported $250 million production budget.

by Todd McCarthy
2:45 AM PST 3/6/2012




Opens
Friday, March 9 (Disney)

Director
Andrew Stanton

Cast
Taylor Kitsch, Lynn Collins, Samantha Morton, Willem Dafoe, Thomas Haden Church, Mark Strong, Ciaran Hinds, Dominic West, James Purefoy, Bryan Cranston, Polly Walker, Daryl Sabara




Given that it's based on a pioneering work of science fiction, there can be little surprise that John Carter  feels like a hodgepodge of any number of familiar elements, some of which were no doubt borrowed by others from Edgar Rice Burroughs and brought full circle here. This Disney extravaganza is a rather charming pastiche, if perhaps not one with sufficient excitement and razzle-dazzle to justify the reported $250 million production budget. Neither classic nor fiasco, the film will likely delight sci-fi geeks most of all, but there's enough here for general Disney audiences as well to generate solid box office worldwide.

If Avatar  had never existed, it's possible that John Carter  would have seemed like more of a genre breakthrough, given the premise of a distant planet penetrated by an Earthling who begins an interplanetary romance and is ultimately accepted into the alien culture (Mars here even has a huge arboreal structure at the heart of things). But echoes resonate from many other sources as well: What came first, the Jedi of Star Wars  or the Jeddak leaders here? Was Taylor Kitsch's buff loincloth look inspired by how good Charlton Heston looked similarly attired in Planet of the Apes ? Doesn't John Carter 's background consist of one part Outlaw Josey Wales and one part Indiana Jones? And doesn't the specter of the ancient Greeks noticeably hover over the everlasting battles being fought among the various neighbors?
 
The Princess of Mars,  the first work by Burroughs ever published, began being serialized in 1912 and was issued as a novel six years later. Neatly, the author has been brought onstage here in an 1881 framing device, as the young nephew of the just-deceased adventurer John Carter who has been called to New York City to be shown a journal the dead man has intended for Edgar's eyes only.

As in Burroughs' story, Carter is a Confederate soldier drawn west after the Civil War by the lure of gold. But no sooner does he find it than he happens upon a cave massively feared by the Indians, one which serves as a portal to a place that looks very much like the American West but is, in fact, the desert-like Barsoom, that fourth planet in the solar system that has often been fantasized about as a possible home to some form of life.
 
The first species Carter encounters when he awakens are just-hatching critters that grow up to become Tharks: thin, tusked, six-limbed, greenish-skinned creatures that are quite jumpy about being in year one thousand of their struggle with the nasties from Zodanga, whose arrogant prince, Sab Than (Dominic West), has just acquired a new, lethal amulet. The Zodangans hover about aboard giant airborne craft that look like Star Wars  by way of Baron von Munchausen and are accompanied by three holy men, most notably the all-knowing and shape-shifting Matai Shang (Mark Strong).
 
Even though they're allied with the aristocrats of Helium — whose elite, including the Jeddak (Ciaran Hinds) and his daughter Princess Dejah Thoris (Lynn Collins), are kitted out with British accents, chintzy costumes and the occasional bad wig reminiscent of a 1950s Ray Harryhausen adventure — the poor Tharks desperately need more help if they hope to survive. When they see how Carter can leap tall rocks in a single bound, by virtue of the thin atmospheric conditions, they decide he's their man.
 
It would take repeated viewings to determine how many times Carter is captured and then escapes in the story line devised by screenwriters Andrew Stanton, Mark Andrews and Michael Chabon. More a series of incidents than a gracefully composed drama of rhythmic arcs and elegantly defined acts, the film finally settles its principal attention on the dilemma of Princess Dejah, whose high-minded scientific orientation (reminiscent of that of Rachel Weisz's Hypatia in Agora ) contributes to her disinclination to play obedient daughter and marry the venal Sab Than for political reasons, as her father requests. With Kitsch and Collins having shared a previous life together in X-Men Origins: Wolverine,  their characters here bask in the sight of two moons as they compare notes on the structure of the solar system and, in an appealingly unconventional, unsentimental way, get together.
 
Stanton, who directed Finding Nemo  and WALL-E, co-directed A Bug's Life  and had a hand in writing all three Toy Story  features, here follows Brad Bird by three months in moving from Pixar animated eminence to live-action fare. Although the result is quite a mishmash, dramatic coherence prevails over visual flair; the colors, skin tones, image sharpness and cohesion of diverse pictorial elements are less than stellar, though the 3D is effective, with comparatively little brightness sacrificed by donning glasses. (The film was reviewed in Imax 3D.) For a Pixar graduate piece, humor is notably lacking.
 
Long-haired, bearded and skimpily clad through most of it, Kitsch fills the action-hero bill, neither more nor less. With raven-black hair framing lagoon-blue eyes, Collins, who was an arrestingly unconventional Portia in The Merchant of Venice  with Al Pacino eight years ago, also was a far from predictable Hollywood-style choice here, so sharply does she attack a standard-issue part. In support, Strong and James Purefoy, the latter as a lightly impudent factotum from Helium, supply the most color.
 


Opens: Friday, March 9 (Disney)

 Production: Walt Disney Pictures
 Cast: Taylor Kitsch, Lynn Collins, Samantha Morton, Willem Dafoe, Thomas Haden Church, Mark Strong, Ciaran Hinds, Dominic West, James Purefoy, Bryan Cranston, Polly Walker, Daryl Sabara
 Director: Andrew Stanton
 Screenwriters: Andrew Stanton, Mark Andrews, Michael Chabon, based on the story A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs
 Producers: Jim Morris, Lindsey Collins, Colin Wilson
 Director of photography: Dan Mindel
 Production designer: Nathan Crowley
 Costume designer: Mayes C. Rubeo
 Editor: Eric Zumbrunnen
 Music: Michael Giacchino
 PG-13, 130 minutes

Aloysius J. Gleek:





The Canadian with his...
hockey stick!

 :laugh: :laugh: 8) 8)
[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tumg1si1CM&feature=relmfu[/youtube]
Uploaded by DisneyMovieTrailers on Mar 1, 2012


[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1pXMuK1KuQ&feature=relmfu[/youtube]
Uploaded by DisneyMovieTrailers on Mar 1, 2012

Jeff Wrangler:
So I gather these stories are considered "science fiction," but from what I'm reading in this thread, they sound more like fantasy to me. I never heard of them before this thread and earlier mentions of the movie. Everybody I knew when I was growing up was into Aztecs and Mayans and hobbits (oh, my!).

Aloysius J. Gleek:


http://movies.nytimes.com/2012/03/09/movies/john-carter-with-taylor-kitsch-and-lynn-collins.html



Movie Review
The Wild, Wild West
of a Certain Red Planet
‘John Carter,’ With Taylor Kitsch and Lynn Collins
By A. O. SCOTT
Published: March 8, 2012


Willem Dafoe voices a noble Martian, left, befriended by Taylor Kitsch as the title character
in “John Carter.”


The cast of “John Carter” includes a bunch of actors best known for the parts they play on television — Detective McNulty from “The Wire,” Walter White from “Breaking Bad” and, most prominently, Tim Riggins from “Friday Night Lights” (Texas forever!) — but the movie itself evokes a much older vintage of popular culture. Directed by the Pixar fixture Andrew Stanton (“Finding Nemo,” “Wall-E”) and based on a 1912 magazine serial by Edgar Rice Burroughs, it is a potpourri of arcane and familiar genres. “Mash-up” doesn’t begin to capture this hectic hybrid; it’s more like a paintball fight.

Messy and chaotic, in other words, but also colorful and kind of fun. The movie begins in an atmosphere of Victorian spookiness: an old manse with dark paneling, a sealed tomb out back and many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore piled up in the study. In the blink of an eye we’re in Arizona Territory just after the Civil War, which is to say classic western territory, with monumental rock formations, beleaguered cavalrymen, bellicose Apaches and a dark saloon into which a taciturn stranger comes a-moseying.

That would be John Carter himself (Taylor Kitsch), a Confederate veteran with a knack for mortal combat and a gloomy aversion to same. But the fight finds him, first in a box canyon on loan from a John Ford picture and then — nonspoiler alert! — on Mars. The red planet resembles the Old West both geologically (a lot of dusty red rocks) and thematically.

A Civil War rages between two factions of Red Men, though it is actually the green, four-armed humanoids known as Tharks who serve the traditional western function of Indians, Noble Savages trying to fight back against a technologically superior foe. The war between the city-states of Helium and Zodanga is more like something out of “Star Trek,” but with elements of the sword-and-sandals epics of the 1950s, what with the togas and the armor, the pillars and the pageantry and the ripely histrionic dialogue.

Which I would be happy to quote at length, if my spellchecker didn’t keep decorating Martian words with squiggly red lines. The bodies and faces of the non-Thark Martians, by the way, are adorned with many such lines, though their blood is literally blue. I would also be glad to elaborate further on the intricacies of Martian culture and biology, except that a) I can’t read the notes I took while wearing 3-D glasses; and b) none of it makes much sense anyway.

And that is just fine. Edgar Rice Burroughs was not J. R. R. Tolkien, or even J. K. Rowling. He was less concerned with constructing a coherent fantasy world than with stringing together as many sensational adventures as he could, and Mr. Stanton (who wrote the screenplay with Mark Andrews and Michael Chabon) follows his example.

Carter, stripped of his shirt and endowed with extraordinary leaping ability (something to do with gravity), befriends some noble Tharks (voiced by Willem Dafoe and Samantha Morton), acquires a loyal Martian “monster dog” and falls in love with a Heliumese (Heliumian?) princess named Dejah Thoris (Lynn Collins), who is both a fierce sword fighter and a big shot at the Helium Academy of Science.

There is more. There is nothing but more: a huge cast, soaring digital architecture, creatures both adorable and fearsome, lines of dialogue (“Thurns are a myth!”) made even more ridiculous by being uttered in earnest. The silliness — much of which is clearly intentional — is blended with some genuine grandeur.

The Pixar touch is evident in the precision of the visual detail and in the wit and energy of Michael Giacchino’s score, but the quality control that has been exercised over this project also has a curiously undermining effect. The movie eagerly sells itself as semitrashy, almost-campy fun, but it is so lavish and fussy that you can’t help thinking that it wants to be taken seriously, and therefore you laugh at, rather than with, its mock sublimity.

This may be a sign of the times, and a problem of scale. “John Carter” tries to evoke, to reanimate, a fondly recalled universe of B-movies, pulp novels and boys’ adventure magazines. But it pursues this modest goal according to blockbuster logic, which buries the easy, scrappy pleasures of the old stuff in expensive excess. A bad movie should not look this good.

“John Carter” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). Much Martian blood (blue and otherwise) is spilled.



John Carter

Opens on Friday nationwide.

Directed by Andrew Stanton; written by Mr. Stanton, Mark Andrews and Michael Chabon, based on the story “The Princess of Mars” by Edgar Rice Burroughs; director of photography, Dan Mindel; edited by Eric Zumbrunnen; production design by Nathan Crowley; costumes by Mayes C. Rubeo; music by Michael Giacchino; special effects supervisor, Chris Corbould; produced by Jim Morris, Colin Wilson and Lindsey Collins; released by Walt Disney Pictures. Running time: 2 hours 17 minutes.

WITH: Taylor Kitsch (John Carter), Lynn Collins (Dejah Thoris), Samantha Morton (Sola), Willem Dafoe (Tars Tarkas), Dominic West (Sab Than), Mark Strong (Matai Shang), Thomas Haden Church (Tal Hajus), Ciaran Hinds (Tardos Mors), James Purefoy (Kantos Kahn), Daryl Sabara (Edgar Rice Burroughs), Polly Walker (Sarkoja) and Bryan Cranston (Powell).

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