John Carter

The achievement of John Carter is that it takes the elements worn to nubs by everything from "Star Wars" to "Avatar" to TV's "Fringe" and makes them fresh again. Read full review

Old-school "Gosh, wow!" sense-of-wonder filmmaking is in short supply in these anxious days, and John Carter (of Mars!) left me with my disbelief in suspended animation and once or twice with goosebumps dotting my arms. And that's enough for me. Read full review

Did anybody expect it to be a metaphor for modern America? Read full review

The result is an entertaining diversion but it lacks the magnificence one desires in the opening chapter of a would-be franchise. Read full review

John Carter is too wickedly strange not to recommend. Movies this expensive usually play it much safer. Read full review

Against the odds, John Carter is itself pretty amazing - an epic pulp saga that slowly rises to the level of its best imitations and wins you over by degrees. Read full review

Spirit counts for something too, and John Carter has plenty of that, in addition to the requisite dashes of wit. Read full review

John Carter manages to be a ridiculous amount of fun, even if you are immune to the charms of Taylor Kitsch (Friday Night Lights) running around in what amounts to a stylish loincloth. Read full review

Rather than trying to overwhelm viewers by overloading the senses, John Carter's effects strive to create something new using as their foundation a book that's fired imaginations for the past century. Read full review

This middle section, in which both Carter and the audience get a crash course in the politics, history, and theology of the Red Planet, is the movie at its most imaginative and most fun. Read full review

If you're willing to suspend not just disbelief but also all considerations of logic and intelligence and narrative coherence, it's also a rip-roaring, fun adventure, fatefully balanced between high camp and boyish seriousness at almost every second. Read full review

Director Andrew Stanton's Disney extravaganza is a rather charming pastiche. Read full review

It’s tempting to believe a great sci-fi yarn exists in Carter, somewhere in the no doubt thick sheaf of studio notes demanding more spoon-feeding of an audience they believe to be equally thick. But more likely, it’s possible that Stanton simply wasn’t ready to make the leap from animation to super-budgeted live action. Read full review

That's kind of the aesthetic that Stanton is going for: over-the-top pulp. But there's something generic about the digitally rendered Martians, and there's a corniness to the dialogue that keeps the audience from any kind of emotional attachment to the Tharks and Zodangans and their ilk. Read full review

John Carter bites off more than even Woola can chew, but it's built on something rare: wonder instead of Hollywood cynicism. Read full review

Does John Carter get the job done for the weekend action audience? Yes, I suppose it does. The massive city on legs that stomps across the landscape is well-done. The Tharks are ingenious, although I'm not sure why they need tusks. Lynn Collins makes a terrific heroine. Read full review

Get your ass to Mars? A handsome new sci-fi adventure that feels rather familiar. Enjoyable enough while it lasts, John Carter is big on ambition and disappointingly short on action. Read full review

There's no wonder or elation or even dopy sincerity here - just a high level of proficiency and, yes, a lot of expensive CGI. Read full review

There are plenty of entertaining moments to latch onto beneath the sci-fi tropes -- and maybe even a few that will inspire a new generation of storytellers. Read full review

It is a potpourri of arcane and familiar genres. "Mash-up" doesn't begin to capture this hectic hybrid; it's more like a paintball fight. Messy and chaotic, in other words, but also colorful and kind of fun. Read full review

What director Andrew Stanton has brought forth from Burroughs' limited, hoary source material is actually kind of fun. Read full review

Stanton has built a fantastic world, but the action is unmemorable. Still, just about every sci-fi/fantasy/superhero adventure you ever loved is in here somewhere. Read full review

So why is everything so thuddingly fun-free? Read full review

When Stanton lets the film be pure popcorn entertainment, with swashbuckling set pieces and lovably corny romanticism, it's a great ride in the Indiana Jones tradition. Read full review

Epically fantastic would be a welcome change, although epically awful would at least keep the symmetry. Alas, epically bland will have to do. Read full review

Though the project, based on the Edgar Rice Burroughs novel "A Princess of Mars," is ambitious, it's also bloated, dreary and humorless. Read full review

Unlike Stanton's memorable animation features, this is surprisingly devoid of humor or winning characterization, though the special effects are fantastic. Read full review

The result is that John Carter plays like an alternate, inferior version of "Avatar"…Plus fleeting hints of John Ford's "The Searchers" - for this is also a Western. Read full review

John Carter isn't much - or rather, it's too much and not enough in weird, clumpy combinations - but it is a curious sort of blur. Read full review

It's all too much, and it's too hard to follow. Less is more, and this movie proves it. Read full review

The film's biggest (and saddest) crime is malaise - it's not that John Carter doesn't care about what it's doing, it just can't make us care, even though the magnitude of every event, conflict and emotion is as melodramatic as its Victorian roots. Read full review

Burroughs invented a primal fiction: a man winds up on another planet, and has to find his way among strange creatures. Sticking to that fable, which was central to "Avatar," might have saved John Carter, but Stanton loses its appealing simplicity in too many battles, too many creatures, too many redundant episodes. [26 March 2012, p.108]

This new Disney film, marked by myriad lapses and marketing follies, bears the woefully familiar earmarks of a big studio production that was pulled and hauled every which way until it lost all shape and flavor. Read full review

That John Carter is so hit and miss, and miss, and miss is unfortunate on any number of levels. Read full review

Aside from a few inspired vistas and alien life-forms (the Road Runner–fast red planet dog Woola is sure to sell a bazillion action figures), John Carter is as deadly dull as its basso-voiced, beefcake slab of a star, Taylor Kitsch. Read full review

Stanton has been given the resources to create an expansive, expensive world, but lacks the instincts to direct live-action, a limitation that shows most in the performances. Bare of chest and fair of feature, Kitsch doesn't exhibit enough charisma to carry a project of this scale. Read full review

Interminably long, dull and incomprehensible, John Carter evokes pretty much every sci-fi classic from the past 50 years without having any real personality of its own. Read full review

Even Strong's best efforts can't save John Carter from collapsing in on itself like a dead star. Read full review

The opening to John Carter is a dud, a battle between airships made of woven bamboo, bursting into computer-generated flame over a sandy terrain. There's nothing to see, nothing to think about, nothing to care about, and nothing to feel, just emptiness. The emptiness is never filled over the course of 132 long, barren minutes. Read full review

Nothing in John Carter really works, since everything in the movie has been done so many times before, and so much better. Read full review

Dejah, with her seen-it-all-before smirk, is not a very sympathetic heroine, and Kitsch is stolid and dull. And as for the red planet, the answer to David Bowie's famous question is no. What a sadd'ning bore it is. Read full review

Most annoying is John Carter's scarcity of action. This much buck should buy more bang. Read full review

As film theorist Siegfried Kracauer once wrote, to paraphrase, art often blooms in the most hostile soil. No such luck here. Read full review