Considered one of the most influential science fiction novels of all time, Edgar Rice Burroughs’ “A Princess of Mars” opened readers’ imaginations to interplanetary heroism, romance, action, adventure, and more. From all accounts, it has the best elements of any great piece of pulp fiction. Almost 100 years after the novel’s release, the long-awaited film adaptation of this story exchanges pulp for stoicism and loses all of its fun in the process.

The biggest problem with Carter isn’t the poor acting, bad dialogue, or bland storytelling. It’s the tone with which director Andrew Stanton, who also co-wrote the screenplay, chose to bestow on the movie, and the way he (or Disney, the studio responsible) attempted to conform the film to hit every quadrant. John Carter was once called John Carter of Mars, a title much more evocative of the type of movie this should have aspired to: daring, charming, and a bit ridiculous, like an Errol Flynn space opera. But the studio decided that dropping the “of Mars” would get more females into the theater and avoid conjuring memories of their colossal 2011 financial failure Mars Needs Moms. This marketing ploy made very little sense to me, especially considering that they didn’t change the rest of their strategy to fit their perceived new goals; what I mean is, every commercial and TV spot aired featured nine foot tall aliens with four arms and Taylor Kitsch leaping around a red planet like a frog with ‘roid rage. Not exactly the best way to distance themselves from the Mars they so desperately wanted to leave behind in the title. And did you know that the film actually opens with Carter as a Confederate soldier on Earth during the Civil War and he’s suddenly transported to Mars? If you knew that, I bet you didn’t learn it from the trailers; again, focusing on that plot point would have been a nice way to shed that studio fear of Martian haze.

But let’s forget the advertising, shall we? A film should always be judged on its own, independently of what a marketing team decides is the best way to sell it. There have been plenty of terrible trailers for great movies (Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and Lucky Number Slevin come to mind), so let’s leave the marketing in our collective rear-view and move back to the movie itself.

This is Andrew Stanton’s first live action feature film (he previously directed Finding Nemo and WALL*E for Pixar), and though the source material he’s working from came way before and absolutely inspired Star Wars, Avatar, and a lot of other sci-fi properties that we’re familiar with today, the burden falls on him as a director to give us something new with a $200 million dollar blockbuster. It’s his responsibility to recognize that we’ve seen action sequences like the ones written in “A Princess of Mars” before, and it’s up to him to do whatever it takes – even if that mean deviating slightly from the source material – to give audiences something that, if it doesn’t take our breath away, at the very least provides an emotional connection to the characters and perhaps some coherent action while avoiding the most asinine of cliches. Unfortunately, we don’t get any of those things in John Carter.

What we do get, instead of pulpy entertainment, is a super serious narrative of the reluctant hero with a past. It’s more Batman Begins than Flash Gordon. There’s a scene in which Carter is on the run from a horde of evil aliens, and he stops and turns to face them. Intercut with flashbacks of his dead wife, Carter leaps into the middle of hundreds of enemies, stands in one place, and flails his sword wildly, slashing anything in his path and bellowing in slow motion while Michael Giacchino’s score demands we take this as a somber moment. Carter just stands there, feet planted, bodies piling up around him as the creatures stupidly attack him one at a time and continue to jump at a man who has slaughtered hundreds of their friends in front of them with very little effort. It’s blockbuster stupidity at its most depressing, removing the potential fun from the story and replacing it with self-serious moments that earned unintentional laughter in my theater.

The story is ripe for adventure in all the right places, but never lives up to its thrilling potential. A soldier is mysteriously transported to Mars (called Barsoom by the natives), basically gaining superpowers as soon as he arrives; because of the differences in gravity, he can leap hundreds of feet at a time and has super strength. But the movie is wildly inconsistent with its rules, contradicting itself every few minutes and resulting in a muddled mess that has some passable effects, but no heart whatsoever. The soulless Taylor Kitsch brings little to the wayward warrior, delivering poorly written lines with no gusto. One minute he kills someone with a single blow, the next he’s struggling to pull a chain from a wall. There’s no continuity with the “powers,” and no danger involved with them, either. Carter barely bleeds throughout the whole film, a wimpier version of Han Solo who ironically inspired the creation of Han Solo. If you’re going to use that archetype, there’s gotta be something more going on underneath the surface (see: Sawyer, “LOST”).

Lynn Collins is gorgeous as Dejah Thoris, but she’s saddled with such a thankless character that it was hard to take her seriously. You may see the occasional supporter come out and defend her character as being badass, but try as the filmmakers might (and they didn’t try very hard), she’s still ultimately just a damsel in distress who relies on Carter to save her from being married to the bad guy. Mark Strong’s talent is totally wasted as the leader of some sort of galactic League of Shadows whose idea of killing time involves wandering from planet to planet, building them up, and orchestrating their downfalls from within. This group’s motivations were never clearly defined, and for a band of eternal creatures who supposedly organize the death of planets all the time, they’re really bad at it. Willem Dafoe yammers his way through a motion-captured performance as a character so blase I could barely pay attention to what he was saying without falling asleep.

The coolest part of the movie is its ending, which has a neat little twist I’ll admit I didn’t see coming. But that’s the only positive thing I can say about the script, which is otherwise full of eye-rolling moments, dumbed-down dialogue, and idiotic one-liners played for the broadest possible laughs. (Soon after Carter wakes up on Barsoom, he yells, “Where on Earth am I?!” He later introduces himsefl to Dafoe’s alien as “John Carter from Virginia,” and for the rest of the movie, they call him “Virginia.” See what I mean?) Michael Giacchino’s score takes its cues from the love theme from Raiders of the Lost Ark, and while some of the special effects were cool (cities, ships, some design elements), the weight of Carter jumping around never felt right. None of the storylines hit me on an emotional level, and I was never invested in what happened to anyone. There are two warring nations on Barsoom, and they live in seemingly the only two cities on the entire planet. Couldn’t they just draw a line down the middle and each take half?

I could go on about the nonsensical elements of this movie (why do inhabitants of Barsoom fly around on spaceships and shoot laser beams at each other, yet still use metal swords for close combat fighting?), but I’ll digress and end by saying that for me, this movie is a complete failure. The only thing that’s epic about John Carter is how much of a disaster it is. Until next time…

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With filming on Pacific Rim scheduled to begin during the first week of November director Guillermo del Toro is continuing to fill out the cast. Charlie Hunnam, Charlie Day, Rinko Kikuchi, Max Martini and Idris Elba are on-board so far, and they will now be joined by Willem Dafoe and Rob Kazinsky.

Willem Dafoe, best known for playing the Green Goblin in Spider-Man, “is being eyed as a rogue scientist with expertise on alien creatures” according to Variety.

British actor Rob Kazinsky was set to appear in The Hobbit as Fili the dwarf, but he had to pull out in April due to personal/health reasons. Luckily for the actor Guillermo del Toro may have remembered him from his time on The Hobbit, and has cast him as “a member of the team trying to defeat the invaders.”

Pacific Rim currently has a release date set for July 12th, 2013, and del Toro has said it will be “the biggest giant monster movie ever made”.

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Filming on Disney’s John Carter of Mars has been under-way since the beginning of the year, and now they have finally set a June 8, 2012 release date for their sci-fi epic.

John Carter of Mars will be director Andrew Stanton’s first big live-action movie after working on Finding Nemo and Wall-E. The cast includes Taylor Kitsch and Lynn Collins (Gambit and Kayla from X-Men Origins: Wolverine), Thomas Haden Church who played Sandman in Spider-Man 3, Mark Strong, Dominic West, James Purefoy and Samantha Morton. Willem Dafoe will also be playing a 10-foot alien with four arms called Tars Tarkas.

Here is the synopsis:

Carter is an American Civil War veteran who goes to sleep in a cave after being chased by Apache Indians and wakes up on Mars, here called Barsoom. Formerly an Earthlike world, it became less hospitable to life due to its advanced age: as the oceans evaporated, and the atmosphere thinned, the planet devolved into partial barbarism with the inhabitants hardened and warlike, fighting one another to survive. Barsoomians distribute scarce water supplies via a worldwide system of canals, controlled by quarreling city-states. The Martian atmosphere is maintained by a power plant. Carter rescues a humanoid Red Martian princess, Dejah Thoris, from the belligerent four-armed Green Martians, whose respect he gains for his superior strength and fighting ability. He enlists the Green Martians’ assistance in winning a civil war, and saves Mars from destruction when its atmosphere plant malfunctions.

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While on the rounds promoting Daybreakers Willem Dafoe revealed to io9 that he will be heading to London next week to begin work on John Carter of Mars. Dafoe will be playing a 10-foot alien with four arms called Tars Tarkas.

What was the appeal in doing John Carter of Mars?

Andrew Stanton, the material, the idea that I’m going to play a 10-foot Martian Warrior. I live very much in the independent cinema world, which is great and that’s where we find a lot of great filmmakers and sometimes more freedom to make personal films. But the flip side of that is, sometimes there isn’t a lot of protection or care. There may be an emotional rigor, but sometimes you don’t have the the technical stuff to work with. You can have lousy lighting [and] no time to prepare properly. You are very vulnerable.

When someone asks you to make a movie directed by Andrew Stanton, with Disney behind, a big tent-pole movie… I know from making Finding Nemo how these Pixar guys work. They’re very thorough , they’re very rigorous, they really get it. It’s a real pleasure because you get so protected because they are so well researched. And you get so much help trying to make something. I think I got excited about that. I like to go back and forth, but it was time to do a big movie again.

Are you going to have to wear two extra prosthetic arms?

I’m not telling. And you know what, I can’t talk that much about it, because I don’t know yet. We don’t even start shooting next week it’s part of prep, I go to London and we do the things that we need to do to know how to start this project… I think officially production starts the 18th.

John Carter of Mars will be director Andrew Stanton’s first big live-action movie after working on Finding Nemo and Wall-E. As well as Dafoe, the cast includes Taylor Kitsch and Lynn Collins (Gambit and Kayla from X-Men Origins: Wolverine), Thomas Haden Church who played Sandman in Spider-Man 3, Mark Strong who we recently saw in Sherlock Holmes, Dominic West, James Purefoy and Samantha Morton.

Carter is an American Civil War veteran who goes to sleep in a cave after being chased by Apache Indians and wakes up on Mars, here called Barsoom. Formerly an Earthlike world, it became less hospitable to life due to its advanced age: as the oceans evaporated, and the atmosphere thinned, the planet devolved into partial barbarism with the inhabitants hardened and warlike, fighting one another to survive. Barsoomians distribute scarce water supplies via a worldwide system of canals, controlled by quarreling city-states. The Martian atmosphere is maintained by a power plant. Carter rescues a humanoid Red Martian princess, Dejah Thoris, from the belligerent four-armed Green Martians, whose respect he gains for his superior strength and fighting ability. He enlists the Green Martians’ assistance in winning a civil war, and saves Mars from destruction when its atmosphere plant malfunctions.

Read similar posts to Willem Dafoe to begin work on John Carter of Mars next week on Filmonic

Vampires are currently the in thing at the moment with Twilight and True Blood dominating the big and small screen. So far I haven’t been ‘bitten’ as it were, and haven’t watched anything vampire related in years. Although that could change after seeing the trailer for Daybreakers.

The film is set in 2019 where a plague transforms the world’s population into vampires. With fewer humans to provide blood, the vampires seek to farm the remaining humans and to find a way to continue their existence. Meanwhile, a secret team of vampires uncover a way that would rescue the human race.

The trailer flew under my radar when it was released a few months ago, so here’s a new poster for the film along with the trailer.

Daybreakers stars Ethan Hawke, Isabel Lucas, Sam Neill, Willem Dafoe and will be released January 8th 2010.

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The trailer for Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox is now online. It’s actually quite refreshing to see a kids movie that isn’t all CGI’d with wide eyed animals. It’s got a retro feel to it. When I first watched the trailer it kinda freaked me out a little, especially the rat, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it gave a few kids nightmares. However, after I watched it a few more times it gradually grew on me.

As the trailer shows, the film has quite a lot of cool actors providing their voices, people such as George Clooney, Meryl Streep, Bill Murray, Michael Gambon, Owen Wilson, Willem Dafoe, Brian Cox and Adrien Brody. Fantastic Mr. Fox will be released on November 13th in the US and October 23rd in the UK

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French site Filmsactu got their hands on some new images from Fantastic Mr. Fox. The film has quite a lot of cool actors providing their voices, people such as George Clooney, Meryl Streep, Bill Murray, Michael Gambon, Owen Wilson, Willem Dafoe, Brian Cox and Adrien Brody.

Directed by Wes Anderson, the stop-motion film is based on Roald Dahl’s classic children’s story and centers on the clever Mr. Fox who must outwit three mean, dimwitted farmers who try their hardest to hurt him and his family.

Fantastic Mr. Fox will be released on November 13th in the US and October 23rd in the UK and we should be getting a trailer by the end of July.

Click here to see another image!

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Willem Dafoe, also known as the Green Goblin to the Spider-Man fans among us, has joined Taylor Kitsch and Lynn Collins in John Carter of Mars. According to The Hollywood Reporter Dafoe will play Tars Tarkas, a leader of the Thark race who knows that the only way his people can survive is if they turn away from war. John Carter of Mars centers on a civil war veteran (Kitsch) who finds himself mysteriously transported to Mars, where his involvement with warring races of the dying planet force him to rediscover his humanity.

It’s interesting to note that the cast so far consists of ex-superhero movie actors. We have Taylor Kitsch and Lynn Collins who we saw a few months ago in X-Men Origins: Wolverine, and now we have two actors from the Spider-Man franchise. Willem Dafoe, and Thomas Haden Church who played Sandman in Spider-Man 3. Disney are looking to set this up as a new franchise, so hiring familiar faces from big superhero films is a good move.

Mars will be directed by Andrew Stanton (Finding Nemo, WALL-E) and filming will begin at the beginning of 2010, with the release date currently set for 2011.

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