It’s just too bad that no one seems to care
I get the feeling that nobody wants to pay money to see John Carter in theatres. Even guys like me who spend countless hours every day scanning fanboy websites don’t seem excited. I’d like to blame that on Disney’s piss-poor marketing campaign but I can’t help but feel like there’s something more to it than that. Namely that the era of the Hollywood space adventure film is dead.
I take no joy in saying that. But in a time when comic book adaptations dominate the summer movie schedule and a film like John Carter — with a director like Andrew Stanton an up-and-coming star like Taylor Kitsch and clearly breathtaking CGI — generates little more than a collective shrug from the cultural zeitgeist I don’t know how I could argue that space adventure films are still viable commercial investments for major studios.
Of course one could argue that Avatar was only released a couple of years ago and its record-breaking box office grosses indicate that there’s still a massive market for space adventures if they’re done well. But that ignores the James Cameron factor and assumes that John Carter will be a creative failure.
Advance word from critics indicates that’s far from the truth. In fact most online critics are heralding John Carter as a triumph of genre filmmaking. Stanton’s got an impressive resumé from his time with Pixar where he directed Finding Nemo and Wall-E and Brad Bird’s easy transition to directing live-action with the fourth instalment of the Mission Impossible franchise suggests those Pixar guys are actually pretty talented.
And as much as I’d love for Kitsch to stay in Texas forever with clear eyes and a full heart it’s exciting to see him begin his transition to movie stardom. Through five seasons of Friday Night Lights Kitsch proved time and again that he was more than just a pretty scruffy face and between this film and Battleship this summer he looks likely to break out this year. If people aren’t interested in John Carter it’s certainly not Tim Riggins’ fault.
The special effects can’t be the issue either as they look crisp and vibrant in trailers — and are special effects really an issue in any movie these days?
So why the disinterest?
I blame it on George Lucas.
The first time I saw a trailer for John Carter I was reminded right away of The Phantom Menace . The sweeping alien landscapes the hordes of warring martians the long-haired star who could easily be mistaken for Jake Lloyd… they all brought me back to that innocent time before I lined up for hours and had my hopes and dreams crushed by a bearded billionaire’s terrible film.
I don’t know that any film has ever been as eagerly anticipated by audiences as The Phantom Menace . The trailers promised alien battles like we’d never seen and a pod-race that we’d never forget. People lined up for weeks and major news stations covered the countdown.
And then it opened and everything changed. Normal people stopped getting nostalgic about Star Wars as it dawned on them that Lucas saw the franchise we loved as a tool to sell toys and make money. Three years later there was a flicker of hope in the months before The Clone Wars was released but it was even worse than The Phantom Menace .
Soon The Lord of the Rings came along. Geeks and mainstreamers alike began openly embracing fantasy. Then The Dark Knight happened and everyone pretended they’d always loved comic books.
It was a bad time for space adventure. Movies like last summer’s The Green Lantern tried to bridge the gap between comics and outer space but they were inevitably awful. Avatar got people into theatres because they wanted to witness the technological 3D breakthrough Cameron was promising. The space adventure storyline was secondary.
This weekend’s release of John Carter may just be the final nail in the coffin Lucas began building for the once-mighty space adventure all those years ago. It’s supposedly a pretty good movie but that’s not enough to make people care.
