 John Carter 
 
 March 7, 2012 
 
 Cast & Credits John Carter Taylor Kitsch 
 
 Dejah Thoris Lynn Collins 
 
 Tars Tarkas Willem Dafoe 
 
 Tal Hajus Thomas Haden Church 
 
 Sola Samantha Morton 
 
 Sab Than Dominic West 
 
 Tardos Mors Ciaran Hinds 
 
 
 
 Disney presents a film directed by Andrew Stanton. Based on "A Princess of Mars," the post-Civil War/pre-Tarzan brainchild of arguably one of the most entertaining non-Disney imagineers of all times, Edgar Rice Burroughs , the book and the Barsoom (a.k.a. In a delightful early scene, he finds that his Earth muscles allow him great leaps and bounds in the lower Martian gravity. Instead, John, played with chest-baring kitsch by "Friday Night Lights" Taylor Kitsch , ends up sprawled on his face, eating a lot of dirt.Sadly, John's problems are "John Carter's" problems, it's just that while our hero eventually figures out how to stop falling down, the movie never does. But just as you can't put Pandora back in the box, filmmaker Andrew Stanton can't find a way to make Burroughs' now-familiar fantasy themes feel fresh.Stanton, who directed and shares writing credit with Mark Andrews and novelist Michael Chabon , is a Pixar veteran who won an Oscar for 2004's "Finding Nemo" and another for 2008's " Wall-E ," both wonderful mixes of fun and fantasy. Burroughs, who later created Tarzan, wrote 11 books on Carter.
– John Carter was burdened by production drama and bad press about its giant budget; now critics are getting a chance to see what the fuss was all about. It's no great work of art, but the story of a Civil War veteran turned Martian hero is reasonably exciting, they say: In Slate, Dana Stevens calls the film "a strange, at times misshapen, but somehow lovable thing: a movie that keeps trying to be smaller and simpler than its $250 million special-effects budget will permit." Its best moments are simply as a "bare-bones space western," but there aren't enough of those moments. Roger Ebert calls the movie a "rousing boy's adventure story" that "will probably succeed" at generating a franchise. Does it "get the job done for the weekend action audience? Yes, I suppose it does," he writes in the Chicago Sun-Times. "For all the bumps in the narrative ... and less-than-stellar 3D effects, John Carter exerts the pull of a tall tale told by a campfire," notes Peter Travers in Rolling Stone. But in the Los Angeles Times, Betsy Sharkey can't forgive the movie's flaws. She calls it "hit and miss, and miss, and miss," noting that it's "the latest version of a long and rich Hollywood tradition: the big-budget fiasco. It's enough to make your jaw drop."