I have read all of the 'John Carter' books many times - both as an impressionable boy and as a more demanding adult, so I came to this movie with all the enthusiasm of a fan who has waited a lifetime to see Barsoom on the big screen. I did not expect the script to stick rigidly to the first novel in the series - after all, movies have different rules and perspectives - but I was surprised and disappointed to see that the motion picture merely scratched the surface E.R. Burrough's plots & story arcs. As the movie uses the novels' characters, but largely imposes its own motivations and directions upon them, it is pretty pointless attempting to review this film as an adaptation of any of the books...so I will briefly state that the leading man has all the drive and charisma of a wet noodle; the supporting characters are just as shallow and unlikeable - those rendered in CGI are entirely unbelievable as living things (they are manifestly not 'real'). The script is incomprehensible, larded with stilted, stagey dialogue and too awful to be rescued by any even moderately-talented actor who might have slipped past the Producers'determination to cast members of the talent-challenged community. Burroughs' Barsoom is, of course, a fantasy world, but it offers plausible (if sometimes fantastical) cultures and societal mechanisms; his conception of the Barsoomian 'heaven' is dark, ironic and oddly predictive of some of the religious cults which emerged in the latter part of the 20th Century. The movie throws out these intelligent, compelling factors and offers a different, wholly dumbed-down & generally incoherent set of explanations. The huge budget did not produce a good movie. I would be pushing the truth to describe it as a mediocre movie. It is an expensive turkey which attempts to lay down enough teenager-friendly plot lines to spark a series, but ultimately sinks under its own weight of inconsistencies. Perhaps the most depressing aspect of 'John Carter' on IMDb is the number of belated, inflated 10/10 puff-piece reviews from studio stooges who wish to boost the movie's rating. Sadly, you don't need to see 'John Carter' to know it is bad - you just need to smell it.
Review of John Carter
