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Superficially, John Carter—or John Carter of Mars, as the end credits still give the title—plays like a derivative patchwork of sci-fi fantasy landmarks from Avatar to Star Wars and Star Trek. Fans of Smallville or Superman Returns will be reminded of young Clark Kent’s fantastic leaps before he learned to fly. Viewers with longer memories may think back to Dune or Planet of the Apes, while those with shorter ones may be reminded of Cowboys and Aliens or Prince of Persia.
The irony, of course, is that Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter stories, the first of which was published 100 years ago this year, are the predecessors, not the successors, of all those tales. Burroughs is better known as the creator of Tarzan, who has enjoyed more success in his own right—but John Carter is the more influential of the two.
Burroughs didn’t invent science fiction, but he perhaps created a genre of serial sci-fi fantasy adventure, with an idealized action hero going from one extraterrestrial adventure to another. Carter’s closest literary ancestor may be Sinbad from One Thousand and One Nights, which is saying something. Buck Rogers, James Kirk and Luke Skywalker are all his descendants, and Jake Sully—the hero of Avatar, which really is a patchwork borrowing from everything Burroughs inspired—is perhaps more indebted to John Carter than any other character in history.
Isn’t all this a technicality, though? Hasn’t Burroughs become so successful and imitated that he’s essentially redundant? Earlier efforts to bring Carter to the screen have failed, but storytellers have gone back again and again to the well of the Barsoom novels (so called for the name the inhabitants of Mars—where Carter’s adventures take place—give their own planet).
Haven’t we seen it all before, from the bestiary amphitheater bloodsport of Attack of the Clones to Princess Leia’s metal bikini? As for Avatar, the long list of parallels would arguably run into spoilers. Isn’t the well dry by now?
Well, yes and no. It’s true that Wall-E director Andrew Stanton’s $250-million extravaganza—based mostly on A Princess of Mars, the first of the Barsoom novels—doesn’t do anything we haven’t seen before. What’s more, the dense political back story, with Zodangans, Heliumites, Tharks and Therns all hugger-mugger, is pretty impenetrable to the newcomer.
Yet somehow it feels credibly ripped from a larger mythology rather than being cobbled together from spare parts, like Star Wars or Avatar. When a Thark gets in another Thark’s face and they lock tusks, or when a massive, stumpy Woola takes off like the Road Runner, one has the sense of Barsoom as a place unto itself, alien and incalculable, unencumbered by self-consciousness of other worlds and franchises. There’s a primitive ur-text quality to John Carter, as if it really is happening here for the first time.
Some of the Christological resonances in subsequent mythologies (notably Superman and Star Wars) crop up here as well, as Jeffrey Overstreet pithily notes by invoking “another J.C. who is either a madman, a liar or just who he says he is” (and the parallels don’t end there).
Yet John Carter is more intriguing than interesting, more respectable than exhilarating. The title hero (played by the whimsically named Taylor Kitsch), a Civil War veteran who walks into a mysterious cave in 19th-century Arizona and finds himself on an alien world, makes a boring hero here—though this requires some perspective. Fantastic fiction has traditionally featured resolutely uninteresting heroes, as C.S. Lewis explains in On Stories:
Every good writer knows that the more unusual the scenes and events of his story are, the more typical his persons should be. Hence Gulliver is a commonplace little man and Alice a commonplace little girl. … To tell how odd things struck odd people is to have an oddity too much: He who is to see strange sights must not himself be strange. He ought to be as nearly as possible Everyman or Anyman.
But in the first place, the movie’s sights are no longer strange to us. Airships, ray guns, multi-limbed beasties—this isn’t terra incognita anymore. With its dusty, rocky, desert terrain, Barsoom isn’t even all that different from the Southwestern landscape Carter leaves behind when he’s mysteriously transported to the red planet.
More crucially, Carter in the movie is not Everyman. When we meet him, he’s a bitter, disillusioned, eccentric coot roaming the Arizona wilderness searching for mysterious, ancient lithographs marking the location of a cave he believes is full of gold. Not only is he not interesting, he isn’t particularly appealing or sympathetic.
What’s especially frustrating is how utterly different this is from the more engaging hero Burroughs sketched on the very first page of A Princess of Mars:
He seemed always to be laughing; and he entered into the sports of the children with the same hearty good fellowship he displayed toward those pastimes in which the men and women of his own age indulged; or he would sit for an hour at a time entertaining my old grandmother with stories of his strange, wild life in all parts of the world. We all loved him, and our slaves fairly worshipped the ground he trod. … [His] eyes were of a steel gray, reflecting a strong and loyal character, filled with fire and initiative. His manners were perfect, and his courtliness was that of a typical Southern gentleman of the highest type.
I’d never read Burroughs until recently, but my heart sank at those lines as I realized how much I would have rather spent two hours with that guy than the film’s grumpy antihero—all the more given how rare heroes with perfect manners and courtliness have become nowadays. What a missed opportunity.
All this is particularly disappointing from Stanton, also director of Finding Nemo and a writer on the Toy Story trilogy and Monsters, Inc. How could a filmmaker with that experience turn around and make a film with such an uninvolving protagonist? Fellow Pixar alum Brad Bird made the leap to live action much more gracefully with Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol, though, to be fair, he set himself a much easier task.
What almost makes up for Carter, unmemorably played by Kitsch, is Lynn Collins as Dejah Thoris, who is not only princess of the city state of Helium, but an eminent scientist—regent of the Royal Academy of Science, in fact—and a rough-and-tumble action heroine who swings a mean sword and doesn’t need rescuing, for the most part.
There are a few references to the Barsoomian religion, which appears to be similar to Hinduism, though the Kali-like goddess is named Issus, which so obviously echoes Jesus that one wonders what Burroughs was thinking. The religion is perpetuated by beings that appear as the equivalent of angels of light, though they may be much the opposite. (For what it’s worth, A) Burroughs was an agnostic and a critic of organized religion, B) Stanton is a professing Christian, and C) the film as it stands has no brief for or against religion as such.)
Stickier is a theme shared with Avatar involving (spoiler warning) a sort of projection or transmigration of souls from one body to another. Like Jake Sully, Carter is willing to leave his body behind to enjoy a more appealing reality in a corporal form. Such indifference to one’s true body is problematic from the perspective of Christian belief that the body is more than a disposable shell—that body and soul form a unity, severed in death but restored in the resurrection.
Following the book, the film has a terrestrial framing story presenting a record of Carter’s exploits to a young relative identified as Burroughs himself (Daryl Sabara from Spy Kids). The earthbound bookends lead to some nice twists in the last act, ending the film on a high note. Not high enough, perhaps, to warrant the 100-year wait—or the bloated budget—but high enough that if there were a prospect of returning to Barsoom in a few years, I’d be up for it.
Register film critic Steven D. Greydanus blogs at NCRegister.com.
Content Advisory: Intense stylized action and sci-fi violence and menace, including non-realistic alien gore; limited profanity and bad language; female characters in scanty attire; a depiction of urination. Teens and up.
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I’m glad to hear that, on the balance, it’s a mitigated success. I was going to see it regardless, just to support Stanton (because I want to see more live-action movies by the Pixar greats).
Over the past two weeks I read the first three novels and the only thing I could think while I read them is “This is so GREAT! There is no way they could put this in the movie today.” I’m sad that it sounds like in some cases, I was right: the concept of a True Gentleman who seeks right for right’s sake (which John Carter clearly is, in the books) is apparently so alien to modern audiences that they only way they could make him relevant is to give him (as the GeekDad review let slip) a Tragic Backstory (“See, modern viewer, he fights not because it’s he’s in the right, but because he’s angry,”). Arg.
Oh, well. I’m still going to take our oldest (who is reading the first novel now) to see it on Saturday.
“There are a few references to the Barsoomian religion, which appears to be similar to Hinduism, though the Kali-like goddess is named Issus, which so obviously echoes Jesus that one wonders what Burroughs was thinking.”
Huh, glad I never made that connection until now. I’m still wondering what the Holy Therns are doing in the first movie, when they don’t show up until the second book, The Gods of Mars, where there existence is unknown to the other Barsoomians.
Victor: “See, modern viewer, he fights not because it’s he’s in the right, but because he’s angry.” Well put.
Pierce Oka: The film borrows elements from a number of books. How heavily, I couldn’t say.
There are a few references to the Barsoomian religion, which appears to be similar to Hinduism, though the Kali-like goddess is named Issus, which so obviously echoes Jesus that one wonders what Burroughs was thinking.
Perhaps he wasn’t thinking of Jesus at all, but rather of the Egyptian goddess Isis. The Issus myth in Burroughs’ stories, as I recall it, places great emphasis on a sacred river, while that of Isis maintains that it is her tears that swell the Nile each year. I will freely concede that it has been a great while since I read any of these books, but that’s what struck me at the time.
Nick Milne: Ah, I like that. Yes, IIRC, the river Iss, clearly etymologically connected to Issus, is a key feature in the cult of Issus. So it’s possible, though not clear, that Burroughs intended no allusion to Jesus (a polyvalent allusion is still possible, and consistent with Burroughs’ negative view of churchy religion). It may be that the Issus / Jesus connection jumps out at me in a way it wouldn’t have for Burroughs if he wasn’t exposed to the phenomenon of I/J equivalence.
When I read the books (very recently) I understood Issus to be a mash-up of Isis and Osiris (who has green - not black - skin but oh well) and didn’t make the “Jesus” connection at all. Egyptology was big in the late 19th century and presumably could have influenced Burroughs, along with early 20th century transcendentalism.
I have no idea where the 8th and 9th rays come from, though! ;-)
My parents named me after Dejah Thoris and when I was finally old enough I read the whole series multiple times. This movie is much anticipated, though I am wary of the mutations that come from moving from book to film. I’m prepared to be pleased and disappointed, like I was with the Lord of the Rings film. At any rate, I have not see the film yet, but I saw a glimpse of Dejah with a sword in her hand in the trailer… I am not sure how I feel about making Dejah Thoris a sword-swinger - she was not in the books!
Dejah: Um, wow. That puts the anticipation / pressure level for the film in a whole different category. Well, at least if there’s a boy in the theater named Carter with a story like yours, you should be leaving the theater happier than he will.
I think the fact that what has really changed in 100 years is the “anyman” since “pastimes in which the men and women of his own age indulged” have changed. Now you’ve made me want to read A Princess of Mars.
I really want to see it because when I go to the theater I only watch grand special effects, that is sci/fi fantasy, animation, action… The rest is rentable home fare.
This is a move I’ve been waiting almost 35 years for, so I have strong feelings about it.
On balance, it was a worthy effort—a “mitigated success” as a commenter above says. I wish it had not cost so much—and frankly the cost is not evident on the screen—so that there would be a greater chance that they would make another film.
As it is, I see three layers to the story: John Carter on Mars, the Thern conspiracy, and the framing story. The framing story works quite well; the problem is in the other parts.
The first element of John Carter on Mars is Carter and the Tharks (the Green Martians). That works quite well—locking tusks, indeed. But John Carter and the Heliumites—from Dejah Thoris on—don’t develop as well. Where are the great friendships and alliances that Carter built? Indeed, where is the love between Carter and Dejah? And Stanton had wonderful actors like James Purefoy as Kantos Kan, who was practically wasted. (Except for the two leads, the cast was borrowed almost wholesale from HBO series, including four, count ‘em, four major actors from HBO’s ROME.)
And I think the source of the lack of development of the Heliumite relationships is because so much time was spent exploring the Thern conspiracy. In fact, my heart sank when the movie opened with that. (In my mind’s eye and imagination, the movie should always have opened with Carter in Arizona.) The Therns were necessary to the framing story, but I would have minimized their role to play just to that fact—that also could have nicely teased them for future films. Reducing their role would have opened much territory for Carter and Dejah’s relationship to grow and for Carter to become a devotee of Helium.
Ah, well, I’m old enough to have learned to keep my expectations low—a lot of disappointment is thus averted.
Thanks for the review, Steven, even if it makes me sad. As a teenager, I read all of the ERB canon that I could get my hands on (we didn’t have Amazon then) and I remember hours of enjoyment reading the adventures of John Carter and his family. I was excited that to hear about the movie, but nervous that Hollywood would not do it right (especially when I saw the beefcake they cast as gentlemanly John Carter).
Oh well, I’ll have to swipe my old, well-thumbed serials novels away from my youngest son, whom I entrusted them to last year and enjoy the Barsoomians on the printed page, if not in the theatre.
Well I for one enjoyed the film, having waited only a year to see (very unlike some of the other commenters here who waitied a good portion of their lives to see it). I thought it was good, but as SGD said, not breaking any new ground (which is ok in my book). I too was sad they messed up John Carter, Hollywood seems to have a problem with Good heroes, they seem to only accept flawed heroes at the very best, but seem to prefer the anti-hero. Which is a real sad affair to begin with, and this only compiles it even more, John Carter really was a good guy, fighting for good because it was good, and he was the perfect gentlemen. How did Stanton mess that one up?!
As for the bit about religion, glad you brought it up SGD! I have a few comments to make.
1) ERB was an agnostic yes, I believe he was born a mormon, then later fell into apostasy (not sure what he thought of mormon belief, but he did like their moral code/manners). According to wikipedia, he was not an anti-religious guy, but did have a negative view of “organized religion” (how cliche!) He dislkied the abuse of religous belief, something he thought was a common trait of “organized religon”
2)And that brings us right to number two: not sure if there will be future movies or not, but religion is not going to get better in the series. In the books, the martian religion was not only a false one, but a very bad one at that. And all the tropes get their play there, evil scheming priests that try to control the world and everyone in it, organized religion as a force of control and brain washing, right down to the very deity herself…Issus is real (though not a true god), but she is/was a very, very bad woman. IOW she is evil, though the Barsoomians don’t know this, only the Therns do. The Therns are the real bad guys of the series, and John Carter spends many a page taking them all out, over the course of several books in fact. The Therns created the religion of Mars to control the populace, and they sent their spies everywhere to propagate their religion, which is why all the Barsoomians believe in Issus to begin with. And as for the afterlife…ouch! The whole way to paradise thing, a total lie. Those pilgrims who make that journey either end up being killed by the deadly beasts who roam the valleys there, or they are enslaved by the therns, but most likely they are eaten by the Therns themselves, yes that is what I said. The Therns are cannibals. So religion on the planet of Mars…it’s a no-go.
Even false religions deserve a better fate than what ERB had in store for the martians, if not for religion itself, then at least for it’s practioners.
UPDATE: I too just saw the film, with our ten-year-old son, and we both LOVED it. It brought to mind those cult adventure favorites from the 1980s like “Krull” or “The Dark Crystal”. And let’s face it: they just aren’t making adventure movies that 10 year old boys can watch with their dads these days, so it was definitely welcome in that regard. If you go into it expecting something along those lines, you won’t be disappointed.
I do find myself disagreeing for the first time with SDG’s “-2” rating on the Decent Films moralometer. I didn’t find anything particularly problematic in it (unlike some of the trailers before the movie—“Wrath of the Titans”? YEESH!)—nothing increased my blood pressure and made me feel like we’d need to have aTalk about it after the film, in other words—and in the end I found John Carter’s change of heart, finding his cause, to be worthy of at least a point in the positive direction (so maybe a -1/+1 rating would be more appropriate?).
So I liked it, will probably see it again in the theaters, and will buy the BluRay/DVD combo pack. I think the way Disney “Marketed” the film, though, is criminal. They could have made money on the film if they’d wanted to.
Oh, and there was at least one of those Pixar “gotcha” moments in the film, where Giacchino’s score takes over and you find yourself hit emotionally out of left field. Plus, I actually liked what they did with the Therns.
Gabriel: Thanks for your comments, which dovetail with my own reading and research. Not sure how Stanton would interact with the increasingly negative religious elements of the books. Right now odds of him getting a chance don’t look good.
Victor: Glad you loved it. I think the Krull and Dark Crystal references are fair (of course, I’m not a fan of either of those films; if anything I liked John Carter better).
Your comments about the moral rating and suggestion of +1/-1 are also fair. I went -2 mostly for the body-soul business and the idea (spoiler warning) that a life lived in a replica body on another planet (including marriage and sex in a replica body) is just as meaningful as living in, you know, one’s own body. Perhaps Avatar has sensitized me to this, but that’s the way allergies and recurring themes work. (Note, also, that although Carter does make provision for the survival of his earthly body, this is not against the possibility of a return from Barsoomian holiday, but because if anything happens to his earthly body, it will mean an end to the Martian life that is the one he really cares about. In a sense he’s like Cypher in The Matrix preferring to lead a virtual life to a real one, except that in Carter’s case everyone else is living in their real bodies and he’s the only virtual player.)
Does Carter finding his cause at the end amount to a moral plus? I dunno, I guess I was never morally engaged by the movie’s conflicts. Maybe I need to see it again.
I probably shouldn’t admit this, but I never saw “Avatar” (I saw “Dances With Wolves” and “Titanic” and they were bad enough—I only want to root for the “bad” guys in a movie if they actually have a shot at winning, which Cameron never gives them), so the (SPOILER ALERT) Carter copy isn’t an issue to which I’m sensitive. To me, it wasn’t really a main theme of the film anyway and more of just a throwaway explanation—they had to explain how he got to Mars in four lines of dialog or less, and the easily-understandable telegraph metaphor seemed to somewhat keep with the book and be somewhat plausible (it’s better than astral projection anyway).
In terms of John Carter’s character arc (SPOILER ALERT!), it’s fairly muted this being an adventure movie, but he does go from someone who (like Carl in “UP!”) has to choose between holding onto the past (he fought for the Confederacy, and it cost him his family, ergo he will never fight for another cause ever again) and actually embracing a cause (which from his words with Ned at the end we can understood to mean “living a life”). The fact that he finally lets go of his past in that beautiful Warhoon battle scene is interesting, too… he literally goes down swinging, fighting the demons of his past, and emerges (again literally) from underneath all that carnage a New Man. Like Carl, he has a cause now, and a new shot at living a life.
The body telegraph thing didn’t really bother me either, and in the books he doesn’t remember ever being young or getting old, so it’s unclear as to whether or not he is an entirely normal human. Also, doesn’t the fact that the body telegraphing works mean that his Barsoomian body is a legitimate body? If we inhabited a Cartesian universe it would seem like he was a “virtual” inhabitant, but since his soul unites to his Barsoomian form, is it any less “real” than his earthly one?
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I also don’t really have any problem with the fate of the Therns and Firstborn in the books/future films, since I don’t like false religions any more than ERB, and I seem to recall several stories in the Old Testament concerning the exposure or destruction of idols and their worshipers. While it may not make it into the films, John Carter acknowledges the hand of Providence several times in the series.
Good point about the body telegraph, Pierce. His soul does only inhabit one physical mass at a time. When you think about our own bodies, how many of the cells that make up our body now are our original cells? Probably not very many. How many of the cells that make up our body at any given time are even human, and not bacteria? We’re constantly reconstituting ourselves, and in that light a physical copy of the body (where the soul is the original soul) doesn’t seem all THAT objectionable.
Pierce Oka: This is precisely my point: Your body is you, and your soul is you. Another body is not you, and can never be the body of your soul.
In the Aristotelian language of Aquinas and the Schoolmen, your soul is the form of your body. By definition, another body, simply by virtue of being a physically separate body occupying other space, has another form, another soul. As soon as we even imagine the possibility of a soul moving from one body to another, not merely controlling it remotely (which is what the “telegraphing” metaphor really implies), but being equally at home in more than one body, we have accepted the Cartesian anthropology underlying reincarnation.
To ring a change on the question the Sadducees asked Jesus regarding marriage in the resurrection: If John Carter’s soul had two bodies, in which body will he rise in the resurrection? If both bodies share in the humanity assumed by Christ, then both bodies must rise. But in which body will John Carter’s soul be? Who or what will the other body be? Do you see the problem? They can’t both be him. And if one of them doesn’t rise, then it wasn’t a true body.
Of course for the sake of fantasy we sometimes put aside such considerations. Watching “Star Trek,” we accept transporter technology and ignore the fact that in the real world such a technology would almost certainly amount to killing a person and creating a copy every time it was used.
But at least the transporter doesn’t leave a body behind that is obviously the real body the person was born with. We can pretend that the transporter actually reassembles the whole person, body and soul, on the other end. John Carter doesn’t allow us that luxury — and while the first Barsoomian “incarnation” was inadvertent, the film clearly ends, like Avatar, with the hero choosing to abandon his natural body to live a better life in another body.
I’m not saying this ruins the film for me or that I can’t still enjoy it. I’m just saying it’s problematic and needs to be clearly understood for what it is.
victor: FWIW, I don’t say the body duplication thing is objectionable, only problematic. You make a good defense: If all the matter making up our bodies can be replaced bit by bit, then in principle can we imagine it all being replaced instantaneously? It’s dodgy but not entirely out of the question, I think.
OTOH, if Carter’s identity really is transferred to the Barsoomian body, then why is it so necessary to protect his earthly body? Why would destroying a body that is no longer Carter’s end his Barsoomian existence? That certainly makes it seem as if his soul is still linked to his earthly body, and he’s only “telegraphing” himself on Barsoom, living by remote control in a body that isn’t really his.
At least Carter’s Barsoomian body is still a human body, so we don’t have a change of species, which is what we get in Avatar. So from that perspective it’s a lot less problematic than Avatar.
Behold! Sixy-second reviews of John Carter, The Lorax, Good Deeds and The Secret World of Arrietty!
Hmmm… Good point about the “If my body dies here, I die there,” line. That does change things a bit. Maybe in that case his body on Mars is just an Aristotelian projection onto Barsoomian matter of the John Carter form on Earth. That wouldn’t make it any less real to the Barsoomians, though. And it’s not really clear to an Aristotelian how it would be all that different from his earthly body, either. Based on your descriptions of “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” and “Real Steel”, though, both of which also got -2s on the moralometer (but neither of which I’ve seen, despite a love of robots and Andy Sirkis’ work), I don’t know if “John Carter” is quite that problematic.
I thought it was a good movie, though, regardless. :-)
I’m only an amateur Thomist/Aristotelian, but would it theoretically be impossible for a being’s form to be joined to physically separated collections of matter? What if the Barsoomian body is John Carter, but is contingent on the existence of his Earthly body? (because, for whatever reasons, God granted the 9th Barsoomian Rays limited subcreative power?)Oh well, it certainly isn’t as problematic as AVATAR, both for reasons mentioned above, and because in John Carter, it’s a simple sciffy plot device for transporting our hero to Barsoom so he can save princesses and sword fight hordes of Martians. There is also the possibility that John is mistaken about having two bodies, seeing as how the Therns don’t seem to leave behind copies of themselves whenever they teleport.
I’ve seen the movie a few times. I find it very entertaining and so do my sons. I think John Carter is a sympathetic character because, even though he’s surly (and we find that he has good reason to be), he seems to always give in to his better angels. I don’t know much about film scores, but I loved John Carter’s. I’d pay to see a sequel.
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