John Carter

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