John Carter is from Pixar genius Andrew Stanton, the man who wrote the Toy Story films and wrote/directed Finding Nemo and WALL*E. By those standards, it would be safe to assume this would be a fabulous film. It is not like he did not have money to spend on it. The film's budget is said to be $250 million and Disney has spent another $100 mil in marketing for the flick. If you have not seen a commercial for it, you must be blind or living under a rock.

What's more, the John Carter of Mars (Barzul, as the Martians call it) series is considered one of the seminal science fiction works of the past century. Edgar Rice Burroughs, best known for writing the Tarzan stories, is credited with writing a series that had a profound influence on many of the hero/sci-fi stories that we are more familiar with. George Lucas openly acknowledges that the John Carter books inspired him to write Star Wars. Many say you can see elements of John Carter in Superman and other popular heroes. This is rich material from which to fashion a story.

So, I came into the screening with high expectations and hopes.

Sigh.

The action is fine and the effects are all strong, you can see the money they spent on the screen, but it lacks a truly engaging story. The main story seems, at times, to boil down to thousands of people being willing to sacrifice themselves to prevent one attractive woman from marrying a mean dude. Ummm, really? The reason the bad guy wants to marry the woman is never really made all that clear. There are multiple bad guys, some of whom have the motivation of wanting to take over the planet but some of them seem to be motivated by... uhhhh... I am not sure. It may be that they just want to bring chaos, but that seems like an awful weak motivation. It is just a mess at times.

But, the worst part is that none of the characters have much emotion or heart. Stanton got more emotional connections out of fish, robots, and toys than he does out of actual living-breathing actors. In fact, The character that the audience cares the most about in the film is a super-fast alien dog-type beast. It hurts a bit that the film lacks the charisma of a big star. Taylor Kitsch is not the next Johnny Depp or Brad Pitt... that much is clear.

I don't want to totally trash it. This is not a terrible film. Like I said, the action pieces are nicely done and, for the most part, Stanton avoids the now-tired Hollywood trend of too many quick cuts in the action scenes so we can barely tell what is going on. But, when there are few characters we actually care about, the action loses all of its tension and excitement.

I also want to put this caveat out there -- I coach a youth baseball team that my son is on. It is full of 11 and 12 year olds. I took the entire team to the John Carter screening to get their opinion on it. Almost all of them loved it. A couple were so-so, but most of them thought it was great and really enjoyed it. So, I guess it is a good flick for 7-14 year old boys.

Maybe that is what Stanton was going for.

-Jason "this sucker is going to lose big money for Disney, I suspect. It is probably going to make maybe $30 mil this opening weekend and will need to be HUGE overseas to have a chance to make back the $250 mil it cost to shoot" Evans