This is my most anticipated presentation of the morning. I've always believed in the pulp cinema potential of Edgar Rice Burrough's Martian Tales. They're the template for many of our modern fantasy/sci-fi movies; Cameron recently plundered them for AVATAR, but emphasized stop-and-gawk world-building over the kind of non-stop roller-coaster thrills that should drive a proper Burroughs adaptation. When Andrew Stanton took on the project for Disney, I considered the crackerjack narrative economy of FINDING NEMO and WALL-E, and thought he'd be sensational - provided he could easily manage the transition from animation to live-action.
The presentation is off to a rough start as Disney's head of production Sean Daniels takes the stage to the TRON LEGACY score. Though that film did decent business, Disney shouldn't be aspiring to that standard - i.e. a beautifully designed film in search of a compelling narrative. They need to do better. Before delving into the studio's live-action slate, Bailey cites a quote from Walt Disney: "I do not make films primarily for children. I make them for the child in all of us, whether we be six or sixty." That's more like it. Now on to JOHN CARTER...
Andrew Stanton is a great filmmaker, and an avowed fan of Burrough's fiction, so I'm struggling to understand why, save for the Woola clip, this movie continues to evince such a strangely dour tone. This is, of course, the awful thing about out-of-context footage presentations: I'm being forced to grade Stanton's movie against my notion of how a John Carter movie should play. But this is the game Disney loves to play, and right now I'm a little heartbroken by what I'm seeing.
The first sequence Stanton shows finds John Carter stumbling upon a glass-encased nursery full of hatching Tharks. Soon, he's dodging rifle-fire - leaping high into the air thanks to Mars' lower gravity - from a team of Tharks led by Tars Tarkas (Willem Dafoe). This leads to an inter-species dialogue where both beings clumsily attempt to establish a basic form of communication (Tars amusingly believes John's name is "Virginia"). Tars wants to see Carter jump again. Carter, who's played as a bit of a rube by Taylor Kitsch, complies, then tries to escape. The scene concludes with someone being shot.
The second scene features an imprisoned Carter breaking free of his chains, only to be chased everywhere he leaps by the scampering, doglike Woola. This is fun, but, due to the nighttime setting and somewhat dim projection in the convention center arena, I can't quite make out Woola's features.
The third scene is between John and imprisoned Dejah Thoris (Lynn Collins), who pleads with Carter to fight for the people of Helium. She also offers him a way back home, which he seems to take just as her soon-to-be husband, Sab Than (Dominic West), busts through the door with a group of soldiers. Carter is gone. "I am alone," laments Thoris.
The final scene is John and Tars in the arena, where they're pitted against a four-armed white ape. This should be the fist-pumping finale to the presentation, but the staging and basic concept are terribly familiar. This is Luke versus the Rancor, or Anakin versus the stuff in ATTACK OF THE CLONES that I don't care to remember. Though it's adequately executed, that's not good enough for an event movie of this magnitude; this sequence has to be sensational. And, I'm sorry, but 3D is not going to give this sequence the extra oomph it needs. Short of a full-scale reshoot (which would be prohibitively expensive for this allegedly $300 million production), this scene looks DOA.
So does the film, sadly. From the drab color palette to the familiar looking set pieces, JOHN CARTER looks completely joyless. Though I'm a huge fan of the idea to shoot on location with performance-captured Tharks, the landscape appears desolate and earthbound when it should feel strange and otherworldly. And then there's the solemn tone, which is a long way from the rollicking spirit of Burrough's books. Plop two flavorless leads in the middle of this dull, dusty universe, and you've got one seriously torpid tentpole.
My one hope for JOHN CARTER is that Stanton and screenwriter Michael Chabon have somehow elevated Burroughs's narrative, imbuing it with a thematic complexity that wasn't present on the page. When your protagonist is a Confederate soldier transplanted to a bizarre new world, where he must befriend an alien species, the temptation to smuggle must be irresistible. So maybe there's a subtlety to the storytelling that we just can't pick up on until we, you know, see the finished movie. Some films just aren't made for footage presentations. Here's hoping JOHN CARTER is one of them.
