John Carter

Plot: John Carter (Taylor Kitsch) is a former confederate officer who stumbles on a Thern, an advanced space alien, whom he shoots and then teleports himself to Mars. Mars has two nations of human people and one nation of 4-armed green people. John Carter has super-powers due to having grown-up in earth gravity. There is a war between the human races, and the Helium nation is about to be defeated by the Zadanga nation. A princess of Helium, Dejah Thoris (Lynn Collins,) has to marry Zadangan leader Sab Thane (Dominic West) as part of the terms of surrender. Dejah does not like this, and she leads an winged attack on the Zadanga. The Thanes are helping the Zadangas in win the battle when John Carter shows up and with his super powers stops the bad guys. In time, John Carter falls in love with Dejah, and he tries to prevent the wedding with Sab. This leads to the final battle, and post-climax scenes that set-up the next sequel.  imdb   Photos

Review: John Carter is enormously uneven, with a complicated plot. It has some great individual scenes, and it has a lot of connecting scenes that are less interesting. Like Avatar, it is a science fiction with a tall alien race that fights human people overlaid with a love story and it has 3D flying scenes. It lacks the beauty of Avatar and the depth of character development. The best scenes are the fighting scenes. The scenes with the animated green people never really worked because their range of expression was so narrow. They also have those stupid horns. I was always distracted by them.

A lot of the action scenes seemed very fast, which might have been deliberate to make the film move faster, but it made the movie less cool to watch. The idea of a walking city is kind of cool, but the appearance of it was not. It should be interesting to fly underneath the legs of the walking city, but somehow it wasn't.

In the end the love story was interesting, and John Carter's final triumph over the Thanes at the end was clever too. 

Cast: Taylor Kitsch, Lynn Collins

Directed by: Andrew Stanton; based on the book by A Princess of Mars, by Edgar Rice Burroughs

Rating:   2.0 stars: Not so bad, especially for SciFi fans.

More: I loved Woola, the six legged dog, easily the best character in the movie.

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