Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: John Carter!

An entire book and countless forum posts have been written about why 2012's John Carter, the last good blockbuster ever made, bombed faster than an IDF thug catching the scent of a child. Some pointed fingers at the title, fabled to have omitted "Of Mars" due to a self-fulfilling superstition among suits than Mars flicks tend to flop, with the result that noone knew who the fuck John Carter was or why they should care. Others blamed the perception that it was too similar to James C*meron's execrable Avatar, based in popular ignorance of exactly who plagiarised whom. Still others blamed poor word-of-mouth resulting from confusing plot elements (presumably the same people who found Inception 2deep4them). But no matter whose fault it was, noone went to see it except me, leaving the remainder of the 2010s a wasteland of sovlless variations on Iron Man punching CGI robots and saying "um, awkward".

Simp: giving m'lady your seat on the bus.
Pimp: man spreading on an eight-legged Mars beast while she jogs to keep up.

The plot will be familiar to early-20th-Century pulp afficionados or anyone who's watched anything ever, because A Princess of Mars was the OG isekai, the template for Superman, and the wellspring of a slew of kino fantasy artwork by Frazetta and others. Chad Confederate civil war veteran Carter (Taylor Kitsch, who is not a merch store for Swifties) is magically transported to Mars where he finds the gravity gap enables his Earth-adapted body to leap hundreds of feet, romances a naked hottie and defeats a succession of enemies to become John Carter of Mars (2012). Sadly the movie at least aimed for general audiences so Dejah Thoris (Lynn Collins) is way overdressed and undertanned for the bright red nude Edgar Rice Burroughs described (given the shitty box office returns, they might as well have committed to the bit).

This is as slutty as she ever gets, which still makes this the most heterosexual movie of the 2010s by about a Martian mile.

In fact the whole look of the movie is overdesigned, perhaps because so many artists had already given their interpretations and the filmmakers felt they had to add a bit of their own signature on top, with the result that the aesthetic of Helium is an odd mix of Greco-Roman, Indian and other influences that seems somehow familiar yet nonspecific. Many might read this as criticism but it's always interesting to look at, and we should not meanly overlook an earnest cinematic effortpoast.

These transports that look like a cross between a flying fish and dragonfly are wonderfully creative.

It would be easy to overlook amid the spectacle, but there's a strong and sophisticated balance of tone achieved throughout the picture as well. The bookends convey a wide-eyed fanboy wonder alien to the post-Carter blockbuster, the buddyship between Carter and his green, four-armed ally Tars is laced with the sort of humour that makes complete sense for the scenario, and there's some audacious cross-cutting during the Thark fight that rounds out our hero's past without the need for reams of exposition. While this seems like praising the filmmakers for not drooling on themselves, that was to prove a high bar in the decade-plus to come.

>mrw filmmakers don't literally eat paint (i'm actually incredibly easy to please)

Would anything have changed had Carter been a smash hit? There are telltale signs of the directions things would take: out-of-place crash zooms and artificial lens flares make an appearance that might pass unnoticed had they not become a punchline in the hands of morons like Abrams and Snyder, and the Thern subplot sticks out as sequel-bait for a follow-up that would never come. Perhaps we'd now be rolling our eyes through a heckin universerino starring Carter alongside Tarzan, Conan, the Shadow and other pulp characters saying "so that happened" while "Back In Black" plays on the soundtrack because you've heard it. When you look at it that way, an honourable flop isn't so bad, is it?