John Carter (of Mars)

[tealin]

I got to see a studio screening of John Carter on Sunday. Part of getting to see it was signing a non-disclosure agreement, in which I am prevented from releasing any significant plot details. Luckily for Disney, they managed to pre-empt me there, because I cannot remember any plot details; in fact, I was hard pressed to gather plot details as they were presented to me. I like to think I am a fairly clever person – several people have informed me this may be the case – but I honestly don't think I have ever been that confused at a movie before.



One should always ask questions at the movies (though in my opinion it is best to keep them to oneself until the filmmaker answers them) – a good movie will set up questions in your mind to keep you interested until they are answered. However, my mental questions during John Carter were as follows:
1. What just happened?
2. Wait, isn't that that other guy?
3. Why did he just say that?
4. What did I just miss? I think it was important. Was it important?
5. How am I supposed to recognise the bad guy when he isn't smiling?
6. What is the name of the one character with a personality, so I can look him up on IMDb?
7. I am pretty sure gravity doesn't affect how strong metal and rock are.*
8. How much padding is in that bra?
9. Why don't they ride the dog?
10. WHAT IS GOING ON
*not actually a question, but the thought did recur several times

I am very curious to hear from someone who's read the book already, to see if the movie makes any more sense with the prerequisite reading ticked off. The really amazing thing to me was that it was directed by an animation guy, and animation is all about clarity clarity clarity, and yet nearly every problem I had with it – story-wise and craft-wise – basically boils down to lack of clarity.

It's not even that I have a problem with surrealism – I am one of very few people I know who actually enjoyed Pirates 3 – but Pirates 3, for all it made little narrative sense and was campy and dumb, was fun, even if I was laughing at it rather than with. And I had no problem telling the characters apart. John Carter was so confusing I missed the fun parts because I was trying to figure out what was going on. It felt like watching someone else's weird dream ... if it had been my dream I would have somehow intuitively known things, but in someone else's head I have no context or web of allusion and am just tossed from one baffling episode to another. It's kind of like if you tried making all of Lord of the Rings in one feature-length movie, didn't bother differentiating the characters beyond racial subcategories, and assumed personalities would take care of themselves as long as you had some banter and action scenes.

We had the head of effects come in to work a couple weeks ago and give a presentation on what they did, which was really interesting and impressive. I had had practically no interest in seeing the movie before, but what I saw in his presentation actually piqued my interest a little. One of the things we saw was a test sequence they shot just for the purpose of trying out a range of challenging CG/live-action interactions. He was dismissive of it as a piece of film, but in retrospect, it was clearer and more characteriffic than anything I can remember in the actual film. I hope it ends up on the DVD or something so people can see it ...

That said, the animation on the CG characters was pretty good (and I'm not just saying that because I know someone on the crew), and above all I really admired the rigs: whoever built those characters knows anatomy, knows what is hard and what is soft and how soft and hard interact, which is a lot more than I can say for any straight-up CG animated thing I've ever worked on. Maybe VFX companies all have supercomputers that can handle those kind of rigs? I'd have thought Disney would be playing at the top of the game, but my computer can't even play most DVDs so maybe I am assuming too much.

Then again, I might possibly have taken stupid pills by accident before seeing the movie, and it wasn't nearly as bad as all that. I may also have been suffering under the influence of seeing Hamlet again the previous night, which is the epitome of clarity and emotional engagement and being able to tell characters apart, so pretty much anything would pale in comparison. But pale that much? I wasn't expecting it to be Hamlet ...

In summary: John Carter is a Hawaiian shirt of a movie; full of visual interest and detail but with no clear hierarchy of events, personalities, or emotions, which would allow one to organise and make sense of what one sees ... and is a bit repetitive ... and is also distinctly lightweight (though unlike John Carter, Hawaiian shirts rarely pretend to be otherwise). Lots of people like Hawaiian shirts, though, so what do I know? In a world where Alice and Wonderland and Pirates 4 break the billion-dollar mark, this could be a big hit!