DJariya

Trailer:




Synopsis:

http://movies.yahoo.com/movie/john-carter/


Running Time= 132 Minutes

With this opening today, I think it's time for an Updated Reviews Thread for people seeing it this weekend. I know David777 created a Review thread a few weeks ago with Poll, but the formatting got a little jacked up.

Supermallet

Ran it in IMAX tonight. It wasn't bad, but it wasn't amazing. The action was generally strong, the pacing was not. Also, was this shot digitally, because the blacks were crushed all to hell.

davidh777

I'd already created a non-"Pixar" reviews thread, but the mods never fixed the poll formatting. It's good to now have a fresh thread so I don't have to keep thinking about that one.

cungar

Sounds racist

Supermallet

It was. Really racist.

Why So Blu?

Lynn Collins, I would do. Hard.

Michael Corvin

Reviewers are nuts. The film was a blast. As Supermallet posted, I think pacing is the only real weakness of the film. General pacing issues aside, there was a perfect amount of humor. I tend to tire of the non-stop one liners that most action flicks feel they must need these days, but here the humor is few and far between but well placed.

I know people in the other thread were saying Disney fucked up by casting virtual unknowns but Kitsch and Collins nailed it.

Also, this is a Disney flick and there's no trailer for Brave? Disney? We get some Tyler Perry nonsense, Battleship crap and some other lame trailer.

Why So Blu?

We got the trailers for:

Madagascar 3
Prometheus
The Avengers (newest one)

Matthew Chmiel

Disney attached The Avengers trailer to John Carter as it comes out sooner than Brave.

Draven

I saw it in 3D today and there was a new trailer for Brave. I also saw the new Avengers trailer, Madagascar 3 and the usual ones for Battleship and Lockout or whatever that Guy Pearce space prison movie is.

As I said in the other thread, I thought John Carter was okay in general but better than I expected. I agree on the humor - there are some genuinely funny moments that don't come across as forced. It had great action, some good plot twists and, despite being a little slow in the middle and a tiny bit confusing (they throw a lot of Martian names at you in a short period of time), it was a pretty decent flick.

Michael Corvin

Damn, no Avengers triler for me either. I got screwed in the trailer department. Three Stooges was the third one. All turds.

Patman

For anyone who's gotten a whiff of the trailer, it's no mystery that earthman "John Carter" somehow shows up on Mars, with extraordinary physical abilities (the most obvious one is the ability to jump high, very high and far, and land without hurting himself too much due to the lower gravity on Mars, similar to Hulk's jumping abilities), as a movie, it does a lot of the technical stuff well, showing us 3 different sets of Martians, with 2 sets of humanoids at war for a long time, and the taller, green-skinned 4-armed Tharks, who pretty much stay on the sidelines. John Carter, himself scarred by the conflicts his military service entailed in the mid-1800s, wants no part of this Martian war, and appears to be emotionally bottled up at the start of his Martian adventures.

There's a lot of material to cover in this film, but the script causes the film to sputter in the middle, and the motivations of the various characters are threadbare, and not quite involving. I'd say the film over-reached on the politics of Mars, and the plot developments don't quite unravel in a natural manner, which lends to itself to a lazy meandering energy level in terms of intensity of the stakes involved for Carter (I blame this lazy tone on the direction of Andrew Stanton), and the 2 humanoid factions at war with one another.

Due to the initial reddish white balance of the Martian atmosphere at the start of Carter's arrival on Mars, it's not quite all that pleasing to the eye, but there is a lot to stare at, as far as the Martian terrain goes, as well as the cities, the set designs, the technology designs, so I can't say it's really boring, just that the film never finds a groove to settle in. With much of the film's Martian terrain scenes shot on location (not in a studio with green screens), the film oddly has a hazy nondescript, unfocased look to it, rendering it less interesting than I had thought it would look.

Taylor Kitsch's casting as John Carter might have been a mis-step, he simply doesn't quite have disarming charm at his disposal as an actor, and comes across far too one-note for most of the film (the reluctant warrior, always looking to avoid physical conflict, but never quite managing to escape them), and has a difficult time raising his game as an actor, but it was like the director was afraid for push Kitsch, so his acting was average. I think it limited director Stanton's choices for camera angles, as he rarely pushed in on actors to rev up the emotional components that propelled the plotlines. Lynn Collins as Dejah Thoris was actually okay for me, I wasn't thrilled with her casting (plus it being a Disney film, I knew her wardrobe would be much more modest than the source material previously alluded to for her character), but she won me over for the most part, even with an accent that moved around from scene to scene.

The 3D is pretty much a non-factor in this film, I put the credit/blame at Stanton's feet, so if you want to save a few $$$$, go for the 2D showing.

I give it 2.5 stars, or a grade of C+.

bluetoast

Was it the archery one, or something newer?

Patman

We got the archery one at my showing.

Draven

The archery one, which I hadn't seen prior to this.

Supermallet

Since we're talking trailers, my IMAX is showing To The Arctic, The Hobbit, and Wrath of the Titans before John Carter.

Michael Corvin

It's definitely very dense and there is a ton of ground to cover in this film. However I did find it far more interesting than anything the prequel trilogy offered up or that warmed over Pocahontas plot Avatar gave us.

bluetoast

Thanks for the info on Brave guys....I'd like to see that trailer on the big screen as opposed to my comp.

Dr. DVD

Saw it. Actually took in a 2D showing because I missed the 3D and from what I have read glad I did. The movie looked nice, but boy was it dull and plodding for the most part. Snappy visuals will only take you so far, and this one failed outside of that area. Taylor Kitsch and most of the cast were okay, but Lynn Collins was horrific. I don't know how she got so bad, as she did a rather good job in Merchant of Venice and other stuff. Obviously she wasn't hired for her acting ability. I wonder if Wolverine knows Gambit is shagging his girl? In all honesty, by the time the movie was over it seemed as though Carter was more or less in it to get some space booty.

I would have voted that it was alright, but I was bored too much of the time so I just voted "sucked". I honestly don't know how someone could look at that script and think $250 million was justified.

Why So Blu?

Really? I thought Collins was great.

Michael Corvin

I thought Collins was great as well.

DaveyJoe

What do you mean by this? The contrast was too high and the blacks were too dark?

Supermallet

Now that I'm not posting after suffering from a tremendous lack of sleep, I didn't mean the blacks were crushed. I mean the blacks weren't black. They were blue-ish with a lot of noise, hence my thought that the film was shot digitally.

joe_b

Saw it with my dad this afternoon. We both enjoyed it, but he had never heard of the books before and found it too similar to a Star Wars movie. I had my own issues with it, but mainly because I read the book last fall and it was difficult not to keep noting all the changes in my head.

Some of my nitpicks/observations:
I still found it to be a decent adaptation and miles ahead of what those lame trailers were making it out to be. The action and alien effects were fantastic and they shouldn't have shied away from showing more of that in the marketing. It just came across as a redundant, boring mess in the ads -- though most of the critics still seem to think it turned out that way.

Giles

yet what I can gather by looking at the tech specs from imdb - this looks like it was shot on 35mm not digitally. why the black levels aren't as deep and dark as they should be seems odd.