R.I.P., John Carter. What its failure means and why it matters...

With ten days down and $53 million in the domestic kitty and $179 million worldwide, it's pretty much time to call 'time of death' for John Carter.  Disney is announcing that the picture will lose them $200 million, and it's almost fitting. The film serves as a shining example of everything that can go wrong when crafting a franchise film in big-studio Hollywood.  Not only was it a case where everything went wrong, it was a film where everything absolutely had to go right on a record level in order to have any hope of making its investment back.  To be frank, they should have seen it coming from a mile away.   

Fantasy exposition done right: I had never read Lord of the Rings, but this explained everything I needed to know...

I knew I was probably going to love The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring right around the seven minute mark.  I had half-heartedly read The Hobbit in middle-school (and watched the musical cartoon version) and wasn't crazy about it, causing me to never get around to reading Lord of the Rings.  But as I sat there on opening night just over ten years ago watching the above prologue unspool before me, not only was I utterly captivated and entertained, but I was left with a complete understanding of the fantastical world that these films would be set in, as well as exactly what was at stake.  It was completely coherent and utterly comprehensible, even to a relative Tolkien newbie.  In all 10-11 hours of the three-film Lord of the Rings saga, I was never once confused by the character names, geographic locations, or the broad plot movements.  So when I tell you that John Carter confused the hell out of me, it's not because I'm some grumpy old man who can't handle his fantasy alongside his comic book adventures.  It's because I'm pretty sure that everyone involved at the highest levels of production had either read the original books or was familiar enough with them to not even question whether a newbie could follow the film version.  Peter Jackson never made that mistake...

Scott Mendelson          

Review: Confusing and unengaging, John Carter (2012) is sci-fi fantasy done wrong, making Avatar look like, well... Avatar.

John Carter: An IMAX 3D Experience
2012
132 minutes
rated PG-13

by Scott Mendelson

I understood Brian DePalma's Mission: Impossible the first time I saw it in theaters.  I had no trouble following Chris Nolan's brain-twister thrillers (Memento, The Prestige, Inception).  It was work, but I more-or-less 'got' the core narrative beats of LA Confidential and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.  But by golly John Carter is a confusing muddle of a movie.  There has been all kinds of hand-wringing about the film's rather large budget and its lousy marketing campaign.  I've taken the film to task for representing Disney's obsessive desire to ditch their core female audience while spending untold millions on boy-friendly franchises that don't pay off (HERE).  But putting all of that aside, Andrew Stanton's visually ambitious and cheerfully innocent boys' adventure film does indeed have a few moments of visual splendor and gee-whiz action.  But it is saddled by a needlessly convoluted narrative that goes nowhere slowly, and that further strains patience by telling its story through cryptic exposition as well as inexplicable casting and costuming choices that renders a large chunk of the supporting cast indistinguishable from each other at key junctures.