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Canberra Today 12°/16° | Friday, March 29, 2024 | Digital Edition | Crossword & Sudoku

Review: “John Carter” (M) ? ?

WRITER/director Andrew Stanton’s motivation for this film is early-20th-century escapist novels that he enjoyed as a child, written by the creator of Tarzan, which may mean something to older film-goers but not much to younger generations who went off-planet for their cinematic kicks.

Former Confederate Captain John Carter gets transported to Mars, which he finds to be not only a survivable environment, but also home to a quartet of tribes trying to put each other out of business.

Stanton builds this well-trodden dramatic path from fervid fantasies devised by Edgar Rice Burroughs into a modern layer of fantasy that had its cinematic flowering in “Star Wars”, “Star Trek” and others of that ilk. Stanton’s elucidation of the difference between fantasy and imagination is its best achievement. Populating the fantasy of a habitable Mars are some wonderful imaginations – animals with six legs, humanoid bipeds with four arms, a dog that most resembles an outsized grub.

Taylor Kitsch plays Carter.  Lynn Collins plays Martian princess Dejah, the views of whom evoke mid-20th-century sword and sandal movie heroines. Most of the other actors wearing motion-capture suits are unidentifiable beneath CG concealments.  Cairan Hinds, Dominic West and Mark Strong retain their earthlike appearance as highly-placed characters in the various factions.

The film runs for 132 minutes. A competent workaday director of B-movies half a century ago could have made it in a shorter run-time.  And, frankly, less tedious.

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Dougal Macdonald

Dougal Macdonald

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