4 out of 5

Director: Andrew Stanton

Poor us.  We, as mass audiences and herded by critics, are often unable to support the big budget movies that actually amount to being the epics they would claim to be.  I’m guilty of it too.  I didn’t see John Carter in the theaters.  But director Andrew Stanton – in support of his rather steadfast initiatives to ‘do it his way’ – delivered a massive, CGI-filled flick with an intelligent story, interesting character arcs, well-earned thrills, and a sense of accomplishment by film’s end that I can’t remember having experienced in quite some time.  Yes, some of its ideas are so huge that it stumbles under the weight of special effects (like the flying sequence) and Taylor Kitsch is a little too young and un-grizzled to give John Carter the kind of mountain man heft it would’ve been nice to see, but I’m willing to swallow those elements to get to the greater picture here.  We start – smartly – with just a taste of what’s to come – touching on the war on Mars between two human tribes – before getting slammed back into Civil War times with gold hunting John Carter.  Great editing and respectable pacing give us the feel for the character (and some good chuckles), making John’s transportation to Mars come at a point when we’re wrapped up in the story and neither rushed into it or tapping our toes out of boredom.  It’s fairly standard outsider-becomes-the-hero stuff after that, but Stanton’s animation training gives everything on the red planet such functional detail and it’s framed with the full scope of a scene in mind, so despite the potential for big explosions and CGI wankery, we get that Star Wars sense of the realized and “what’s around this corner” that Stanton mentioned he was going for.  Yes, we have Burroughs to thank for the extra flourishes that make this more than a typical adventure story, but we have our script writers to thank for not shedding all of this world-building for the sake of squeezing this into 90 minutes.  And the balls to go for PG-13 with a Disney franchise.  Hopefully the right people liked this and will give Stanton another shot at live action.