Adventures in the Talkies: John Carter (of Mars)

Yes, let's engage in a dialogue, Fandango, a service I didn't even want to use, but I couldn't figure out how to get my AMC Stubs account to work online, and I was lazy, so I paid the service charge. So glad I did, or else you and I would not be having this conversation. I'm going to invite my friend Kate to talk to you as well, because I feel she has some valuable feedback regarding this film as well.

How did I like it? Well, I liked Taylor Kitsch. He's handsome and charming, less dour than Timothy Olyphant, more normal than Ben Foster--I'm still puzzled that the Vulture feature about Taylor Kitsch's bankability found Ben Foster to be his comparable peer--and, in Kate's words, not as bulky he-man as Channing Tatum, but nonetheless defined and pleasant to the eye, particularly in a film where his shirt comes off 30 minutes in and doesn't grow back until the last three minutes.

Direct from Kate:
May I suggest things that would have made the movie better. 

1.  About 30 fewer minutes

2.  Not casting a black hole of suck as the princess. [Ed. note: Lynn Collins, who I should have recognized for her similarly listless tough girl performance in X-Men: Origins: Wolverine: The One Where Liev Schreiber Has Enormous Sideburns]

3.  An explanation of why Dominic West was the only character with a British accent [Ed. note: I also liked when Kate mentioned she was waiting patiently for DW to bust out "What the fuck did I do?" a la Jimmy McNulty on The Wire]

4.  A shot of TK's  bare ass.

I have to admit I spent a lot of the film silently mouthing the word "What?" In terms of exposition, it felt like the movie was stuck somewhere between the breezy "Here's a couple of paragraphs. Got it? Good!" of the original Star Wars trilogy and the dense, fucknutty world of Frank Herbert's Dune. There was some allegorical shenanigans involving the various peoples who shared the planet Barstool (or Bazooms), which I imagine is what Edgar Rice Burroughs explored a little more in the original stories (I won't be reading them, so feel free to let me know if I guessed right), lots of stuff about arranged marriages and secret daughters and struggles for leadership roles, which only drew my eye because Ciaran Hinds apparently walked off with his Rome costume and let a designer glue some Muppet remainders to it in order to play the leader of the most human-looking Martians.

After the movie, which was a treat to Kate for her birthday--I envy her making out better than I did last year, when the two of us when and got emotionally drummed by Blue Valentine; happy birthday to me!!!--we talked a great deal about how long it was. There's no earthly--ha ha Mars--reason that movie should have been over 2 hours. Some serious, serious editing and rework needed to be done. But I'm guessing, based on the pedigree of the director (Andrew Stanton of Toy Storys and WALL-E fame) and writers (Stanton, some other cat who is credited with a lot of storyboard work, and MICHAEL CHABON, PULITZER-PRIZE WINNING AUTHOR), enthusiasm ran away with everyone, and no one was able to say no to any portion of the story being cut (not even the addition of an unnecessary storytelling device of having Edgar Rice Burroughs himself in the film, played by Daryl Sabara, who was doing some level 5 The Goonies-styled rounded eyes of surprise acting).

But I have to admit that it was rollicking in many spots.

1. I sort of sighed and rolled my eyes over the gladiator arena scene, but Kate rightfully defended it as a pretty cool and fun and stirring part of the movie.
2. Some of the running and jumping and flying the dragonfly-looking ship-bikes were cool. 
3. There was some old-school Disney wackiness with the Jim Henson's Labyrinth-looking Woola and John Carter (of Mars) trying to figure out how to navigate the planet without pancaking into the surface after Flubbering himself 60 feet into the air. 
4. James Purefoy, never my favorite charming rogue on Rome, turns up for a rescue scene and is so bewilderingly charming and roguish that both Kate and I wondered where he'd been the whole movie.
5. Mark Strong... god, was it weird, whatever he was doing. He was sure doing it confidently, though. I guess he was sort of a Superman II-ish villain who acted like--nerd alert--The Silence of the Doctor Who-scape, manipulating events and madness through the subtle control of one ambitious monkey man (that's Dominic West, in case you haven't seen him...boy, he looks like a monkey).
6. Samantha Morton and Thomas Hayden Church did great voice work. I didn't realize the two of them were some of the green folks until the very end.
7. Bryan Cranston showed up for some stuff at the beginning. I get the feeling there was a whole other movie going on in someone else's mind where he and John Carter (of Mars) team up for banter and shenanigans a la The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. (which, by the way, did a much better, small-scale job of balancing olde-tymey and sci-fi kooky).

Anyway, it was no super-crapulent disaster, like Wild Wild West, but it certainly could have used a producer or two hounding the artists to reel it in. And as you can see, I refuse to learn its lexicon, so they probably won't get me to watch the sequel, whether it be on the big screen or direct-to-On-Demand. I look forward to the inevitable RiffTrax or How Did This Get Made? podcast. Until then, I plan on peppering nearly every personal conversation I have with, "In the movie I saw most recently, John Carter..." whether or not it is germane.