From March 12, 2013
MOVIE REVIEW:
Overall: B
John Carter was directed by Andrew Stanton (of Finding Nemo and WALL-E fame) and it was pretty good.
I recommend it!
The acting and CGI were far better than in the Star Wars prequel trilogy. (The music wasn't because, well, how can you beat John Williams unless you went with Mozart or Beethoven or something?)
However, a lot of movie critics have apparently panned it. I completely disagree. A reviewer for Variety, Peter Debruge, said, "To watch John Carter is to wonder where in this jumbled space opera one might find the intuitive sense of wonderment and awe Stanton brought to Finding Nemo and WALL-E." Christy Lemire of the Associated Press wrote that, "Except for a strong cast, a few striking visuals and some unexpected flashes of humor, John Carter is just a dreary, convoluted trudge — a soulless sprawl of computer-generated blippery converted to 3-D."
What the hell? Did she even see the same movie that I did? The movie is far from dreary. It's very funny, visually stunning, well-acted, etc. Sure the story could seem convoluted, I suppose, to someone who isn't used to watching sci-fi fare. They throw around a lot of names/words that don't make sense until later, but I'm used to that.
Owen Glieberman of Entertainment Weekly gave the film a D rating, feeling, "Nothing in John Carter really works, since everything in the movie has been done so many times before, and so much better." I guess that's the problem this movie will suffer: it will be compared to things like Star Wars (hell, I even did it). While this makes sense to compare them, you have to realize and note that this story is 100 years old! It's exactly 60 years older than Star Wars, 49 years older than Star Trek, and even 48 years older than DUNE. It's pretty much the origin of all sci-fi (except Jules Verne and H.G. Wells' stuff).
I just don't like how many critics have basically said, "Meh. It's just like other stuff." And then they don't even acknowledge that John Carter inspired it all. That's sort of infuriating to me.
One of my friends said the he appreciated the subtlety of its religious undertones and its warning about the potential for blind faith to destroy all.
