As choppily edited and incoherent as a 1980s Indonesian fantasy film, this $250 million epic fail was Disneys attempt to wring a franchise out of the Edgar Rice Burroughs character, which does not bode well for the forthcoming Tarzan remake starring Alexander Skarsgard. With its Avatar-like aliens and expensive action sequences, John Carter mustve looked like a great package to studio executives, but the lack of character motivation and backstory, coupled with an editing style that reduces every shot to three seconds (or less), means the film plays more like a 2 hour long trailer. Theres a shapeshifting alien, a beautiful Martian princess and some hoo-hah about a medallion, but the filmmakers dont want to give the viewer any more information than that for fear of slowing the movie down. The resulting picture keeps the audience at arms length throughout, and when the critics proved predictably unkind (USA Today called it bloated, dreary and humourless), the film struggled to a $73 million domestic haul in US cinemas.
Ian Watson is the author of 'Midnight Movie Madness', a 600+ page guide to "bad" movies from 'Reefer Madness' to 'Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead.'
