More like “John Carter of Meh.”
It appears that blockbuster movie season is starting a little bit earlier than the traditional Memorial Day weekend, or so the promoters of John Carter would have us believe. Indeed, the trailers before the movie were all for upcoming summer blockbusters—dear mother of Spock, why are we getting yet another Men In Black movie? And, like many movies that will come up this summer, John Carter (of Mars) is a sci-fi movie that tries very hard to be many things…and doesn’t do any of them that well.
Sci-fi as a genre tends to have movies that fall into two categories: Star Wars/Star Trek/Aliens and those movies that want to be them. Of course, movies like District 9, Moon and the recent Chronicle (go see it, by the way!) can be excellent twists on established tropes and should probably be considered as a third category, but those movies are rarely big budget blockbusters. At any rate, John Carter was marketed as “this generation’s Star Wars”, a claim that isn’t at all justified by the film itself. Continue reading
