In a recent New Yorker profile, director Andrew Stanton (Finding Nemo, Wall-E) likened his experience on the $250-mln sci-fi epic John Carter — his first foray into live-action — to “synchronized swimming with aircraft carriers.” Having now seen the finished product, I regret to say those aircraft carriers never did get their act together.

This long-gestating passion project is a chore to sit through; you can feel the dead weight of all that money dragging it down in every scene. Despite being given complete creative control by Disney (almost unheard of in Hollywood these days), Stanton doesn’t do anything we haven’t seen a million times before, seemingly paralyzed by the need to deliver a gargantuan, four-quadrant hit. Worse, he doesn’t even deliver good formula, fumbling the set-pieces and garbling the plot.

For the first 30 minutes of John Carter, adapted from Edgar Rice Burroughs’ nearly 100-year-old novel Princess of Mars, you could swear Stanton was deliberately sabotaging his own film. The opening voice-over, meant to get us up to speed on the political realities of life on Mars (or, as it’s known by its inhabitants, “Barsoom”), is a dull drone in your ear, immediately dampening your hopes. The gist is that there’s a conflict raging between two humanoid races, the Zodangans and the Heliumites, and to illustrate this conflict we get a spectacularly incoherent battle scene involving CGI airships, Jimmy McNulty from The Wire in a rabbit pelt, and some bald floating dude (Mark Strong) randomly manipulating events from on-high. The sequence ends with Bald Floating Dude appearing before McNulty and endowing him with a magical, purple hand.

While we’re still attempting to make sense of this, Stanton abruptly cuts to 1881 America, where a well-dressed mystery man named John Carter (Taylor Kitsch) sends a telegram to someone named Ned. Confusingly, the very next scene shows a young man named Ed (Daryl Sabara) — who we soon discover to be the young Edgar Rice Burroughs — responding to said telegram by rushing to Carter’s lavish country estate. When Ed or Ned arrives, we discover that Carter is dead, so maybe Ed or Ned wasn’t responding to his telegram. (Or maybe the telegram arrived very late.)

In any case, Ed or Ned — who turns out to be Carter’s nephew — is asked by an executor to read through Carter’s private journal. Left alone in a study, Ed or Ned cracks the musty volume, sending us back in time yet again, to 1868. There, we meet a younger, more grizzled Carter, a former captain of the vanquished Confederate Army. He’s in an Arizona saloon grouchily bartering gold for beans (just like all our ancestors did) when a Union Army captain (Bryan Cranston) appears and press-gangs him into fighting natives on the frontier. Cut to: the frontier, and a really poorly edited battle between Union soldiers and injuns, which ends with Carter taking refuge in a cave. Not just any cave, mind you, but a gold-filled cave that he discovered some time ago and has been trying to keep secret. Inside the cave, Bald Floating Dude mysteriously appears and, for reasons that eluded me, magicks Carter away to Barsoom.

By this point, you’re desperate for Stanton to pick a plot and stay with it. (It feels as if you’ve been channel-surfing on a night when there’s nothing good on.) Things stabilize somewhat once Carter awakens on Barsoom, but his adventures there are woefully routine. Almost immediately, he’s captured by a race of green, four-armed creatures called Tharks who dress him in nipple-exposing slave garb and force him to fight on their behalf. He also meets the bodacious Heliumite princess Dejah Thoris (Lynn Collins); gets a dog-like companion that looks like a mound of vomit; learns about some mysterious power called the Ninth Ray (which I’m still very unclear on); and participates in many, many tedious battles involving Tharks, Zodangans, and Heliumites.

As fan-boys everywhere can tell you, the original Burroughs novel was a source of inspiration to countless sci-fi films, from Star Wars to Star Trek to Avatar, and as such it’s been plundered of pretty much everything that made it original. It could still have worked if Stanton had given it a fresh coat of paint, but instead he acts as if we’d never been exposed to the intervening century of sci-fi — as if seeing the same old aliens and spaceships and stuff would blow our minds.That’s the ultimate failure of this supposed passion project: how terribly un-passionate it is.

At worst, I was expecting an ambitious, obsessional boondoggle ala David Lynch’s Dune. Instead, it’s a dull programmer ala 10,000 BC or Prince of Persia. There’s literally nothing to indicate Stanton had even heard of Princess of Mars or Edgar Rice Burroughs before landing the gig. Is it possible fantasy filmmakers are now so steeped in blockbuster bombast they’ve been rendered incapable of envisioning anything else?

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Scott MacDonald writes for Toronto Standard.

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