I recently read a report that Hollywood had more box office bombs in 2022 than any year on record, and out of morbid interest I looked through the list of worst movie money pits of all time. About halfway down the list lies a wonderfully bad 2012 sci-fi that managed to lose somewhere between $113-200 million dollars. Let’s talk about a movie that shot for the stars but ended up as a crater in someone’s backyard. Let’s talk about John Carter of Mars.
The film is a mish-mash of plot elements from the book A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs, following the adventures of army veteran and gold prospector John Carter, who after fighting off Apache warriors in Arizona finds a cave with a weird bald neo-nazi looking dude. After killing the guy, John touches a medallion and awakes in a new, super-strong body on Mars. From here, John is taken captive by a variety of alien species, fighting to not get drawn into other people’s wars while the audience fights to stay awake.
John is joined in his strange, meandering quest by Dejah, a copper-skinned princess and scientist of a city under siege; Sola, a surprisingly sincere four-armed alien rejected by her tribe; and a dog that looks like a cross between an axolotl and a flaccid penis. I really wish I was kidding about that.
The biggest problem in this film is an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink narrative structure that makes four attempts at opening setups, including various flashbacks and asides, and it’s almost half an hour in before the plot actually gets underway. It makes the extended scene of John stumbling about, learning how to walk in Mars’s low gravity painfully symbolic. It’s not until the halfway mark that there is a clear plot goal for John, and then that particular quest is discarded almost as soon as it is finished. The dialogue is just awful, never doing more than just describing what is already completely bloody obvious on screen, and an early scene has our eponymous hero threatening a shopkeeper, dramatically pointing a gun and snarling the immortal phrase: “Beans. First item on the list is beans.”
The other big problem is that John is, in all honesty, kind of a dick. The growly, detached veteran fights tooth and nail to not get involved in another war after the death of his wife and daughter, but is supposed to be slowly drawn into Martian politics by his growing attraction to Dejah. Unfortunately, this pairing has all the chemistry of a brick. They have literally no reason to like each other, apart from the fact that the plot needs it to happen. The film could have cut out all these scenes entirely and focussed instead on Sola, who struggles with her tribe’s expectations and is unknowingly watched over by her estranged father. Pairing this to John coming to terms with the death of his own daughter would have been a great film. While we’re at it, it needs to be acknowledged that the film (based on a 1912 book) is very on the nose racist, depicting the tribal aliens as stupid and violent. To be fair, the space nazi’s plan is to give a Martian warlord a strange blue spiderweb power so that they can… keep the secret of that power out of Martian hands? Somewhere, somehow, that made sense to someone.
Let’s not get too down on this film though. Yes it had terrible characters, dialogue and plot, but I love the pulp-fiction sci fi aesthetic and would love to see this style make a comeback.
That’s it from me for this week, I’m still working my way through the list of glorious trainwrecks, but there’s always room for more! If any one can point me towards a copy of 1995’s Cutthroat Island that’d be fantastic, cheers!
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