Summary: Born in Virginia and a veteran of the Civil War, John Carter is an honorable and courageous man. However, the war let
him dispirited and broken. Accidentally transported to the planet of Barsoom, he soon finds his strength and jumping abilities greatly amplified. He must use these newfound powers to survive the centuries-old war between the native inhabitants and save this dying world. (Disney)…
CRITICS CONSENSUS: CRAZY TO MISS (BARELY)
Reviewed by: Roger Ebert
Does John Carter get the job done for the weekend action audience? Yes, I suppose it does. The massive city on legs that stomps across the landscape is well-done. The Tharks are ingenious, although I’m not sure why they need tusks. Lynn Collins makes a terrific heroine.
Reviewed by: James Berardinelli
The result is an entertaining diversion but it lacks the magnificence one desires in the opening chapter of a would-be franchise.
Reviewed by: Owen Gleiberman
Nothing in John Carter really works, since everything in the movie has been done so many times before, and so much better.
Reviewed by: Peter Travers
John Carter bites off more than even Woola can chew, but it’s built on something rare: wonder instead of Hollywood cynicism.
Reviewed by: Mick LaSalle
The opening to John Carter is a dud, a battle between airships made of woven bamboo, bursting into computer-generated flame over a sandy terrain. There’s nothing to see, nothing to think about, nothing to care about, and nothing to feel, just emptiness. The emptiness is never filled over the course of 132 long, barren minutes.
Reviewed by: Marc Savlov
Old-school “Gosh, wow!” sense-of-wonder filmmaking is in short supply in these anxious days, and John Carter (of Mars!) left me with my disbelief in suspended animation and once or twice with goosebumps dotting my arms. And that’s enough for me.
Reviewed by: Ty Burr
Against the odds, John Carter is itself pretty amazing – an epic pulp saga that slowly rises to the level of its best imitations and wins you over by degrees.
Reviewed by: Joe Morgenstern
This new Disney film, marked by myriad lapses and marketing follies, bears the woefully familiar earmarks of a big studio production that was pulled and hauled every which way until it lost all shape and flavor.
Reviewed by: Steven Rea
That’s kind of the aesthetic that Stanton is going for: over-the-top pulp. But there’s something generic about the digitally rendered Martians, and there’s a corniness to the dialogue that keeps the audience from any kind of emotional attachment to the Tharks and Zodangans and their ilk.
Reviewed by: Claudia Puig
Though the project, based on the Edgar Rice Burroughs novel “A Princess of Mars,” is ambitious, it’s also bloated, dreary and humorless.
Reviewed by: Rick Groen
Epically fantastic would be a welcome change, although epically awful would at least keep the symmetry. Alas, epically bland will have to do.
Reviewed by: A.O. Scott
It is a potpourri of arcane and familiar genres. “Mash-up” doesn’t begin to capture this hectic hybrid; it’s more like a paintball fight. Messy and chaotic, in other words, but also colorful and kind of fun.
Reviewed by: Todd McCarthy
Director Andrew Stanton’s Disney extravaganza is a rather charming pastiche.
Reviewed by: Michael Phillips
John Carter isn’t much – or rather, it’s too much and not enough in weird, clumpy combinations – but it is a curious sort of blur.
Reviewed by: Andrew O’Hehir
If you’re willing to suspend not just disbelief but also all considerations of logic and intelligence and narrative coherence, it’s also a rip-roaring, fun adventure, fatefully balanced between high camp and boyish seriousness at almost every second.
Reviewed by: Keith Phipps
Rather than trying to overwhelm viewers by overloading the senses, John Carter’s effects strive to create something new using as their foundation a book that’s fired imaginations for the past century.
Reviewed by: Ann Hornaday
Even Strong’s best efforts can’t save John Carter from collapsing in on itself like a dead star.
Reviewed by: Richard Corliss
The result is that John Carter plays like an alternate, inferior version of “Avatar”…Plus fleeting hints of John Ford’s “The Searchers” – for this is also a Western.
Reviewed by: Joe Neumaier
What director Andrew Stanton has brought forth from Burroughs’ limited, hoary source material is actually kind of fun.
Reviewed by: Connie Ogle
John Carter manages to be a ridiculous amount of fun, even if you are immune to the charms of Taylor Kitsch (Friday Night Lights) running around in what amounts to a stylish loincloth.
Reviewed by: M. E. Russell
John Carter is too wickedly strange not to recommend. Movies this expensive usually play it much safer.
Reviewed by: Keith Uhlich
Aside from a few inspired vistas and alien life-forms (the Road Runner–fast red planet dog Woola is sure to sell a bazillion action figures), John Carter is as deadly dull as its basso-voiced, beefcake slab of a star, Taylor Kitsch.
Reviewed by: Betsy Sharkey
That John Carter is so hit and miss, and miss, and miss is unfortunate on any number of levels.
Reviewed by: Steve Persall
Most annoying is John Carter’s scarcity of action. This much buck should buy more bang.
Reviewed by: Stephanie Zacharek
Spirit counts for something too, and John Carter has plenty of that, in addition to the requisite dashes of wit.
Reviewed by: Bill Goodykoontz
It’s all too much, and it’s too hard to follow. Less is more, and this movie proves it.
Reviewed by: Dana Stevens
This middle section, in which both Carter and the audience get a crash course in the politics, history, and theology of the Red Planet, is the movie at its most imaginative and most fun.
Stanton has built a fantastic world, but the action is unmemorable. Still, just about every sci-fi/fantasy/superhero adventure you ever loved is in here somewhere.
Reviewed by: Sara Maria Vizcarrondo
The film’s biggest (and saddest) crime is malaise – it’s not that John Carter doesn’t care about what it’s doing, it just can’t make us care, even though the magnitude of every event, conflict and emotion is as melodramatic as its Victorian roots.
Reviewed by: Jaime N. Christley
As film theorist Siegfried Kracauer once wrote, to paraphrase, art often blooms in the most hostile soil. No such luck here.
Reviewed by: Ben Sachs
Unlike Stanton’s memorable animation features, this is surprisingly devoid of humor or winning characterization, though the special effects are fantastic.
Reviewed by: Peter Debruge
Stanton has been given the resources to create an expansive, expensive world, but lacks the instincts to direct live-action, a limitation that shows most in the performances. Bare of chest and fair of feature, Kitsch doesn’t exhibit enough charisma to carry a project of this scale.
Source : MetaCritic
